Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack. 2026 is an inflection point for Tempo: after a major architectural upgrade and the launch of TraceQL metrics, we are shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence, and evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products (App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants).

• 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 the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable).
• Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams, working closely with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing.
• Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning.
• Contribute to open source: engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

• Technical leadership: a track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations.
• Deep systems experience: substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar.
• Strong software craftsmanship: you write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship.
• Strong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
• Operational mindset: you’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore.
• Customer focus and pragmatism: you break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration: you lead through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, not hierarchy, and communicate clearly 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 intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents).
• Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a homelab).
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

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. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 109,709 - EUR 131,651. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here. Compensation ranges are country specific; if you are applying from a different location, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.