Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations. Built on open source and open standards, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability. Customers include Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries.

We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team.

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team.
• Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping Tempo’s interfaces for LLM-driven assistants and external integrators.
• Drive operational excellence, owning outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and pushing toward Zero Ops.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and ship what unblocks them.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.
• Participate in on-call for the services you help build.
• Contribute to open source, engaging the community and reviewing external contributions.

• Technical leadership: track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience: hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, performant software.
• Strong Go, or a path to it; deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
• Operational mindset: owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, treated SLOs as a product feature.
• Customer focus and pragmatism: break complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs for programmatic consumption.
• Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

In the Republic of Ireland, the base compensation range is EUR 117,600 - EUR 141,120. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed on the careers page. We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication.

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic protected by local law.