Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | Germany | Remote

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform. With 35 million users and 7,000+ customers, it is a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries.

Staff Software Engineer on the Tempo team, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. The role focuses on evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform for next-generation observability products, including App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants.

• Set technical direction on the hardest problems in the roadmap, leading multi-quarter initiatives.
• Own architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping Tempo's interfaces for LLM-driven assistants and external integrators.
• Drive operational excellence against SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB).
• Partner with Product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, participate in on-call, and contribute to open source.

• Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong Go, or deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++).
• Operational mindset with experience owning production services and treating SLOs as a product feature.
• Bonus: Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, query languages, columnar storage formats, Kubernetes, AI/LLM consumers, open-source contribution.

Base compensation range for Germany: EUR 109,709 - EUR 131,651. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits. The company offers 30 days annual leave per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.

Apply via the Greenhouse link.