Senior Backend Engineer (Databases Tempo)

Join Grafana Labs as a Senior Backend Engineer for Tempo, where you'll own technical direction on complex projects, contribute to operational excellence, collaborate with product teams, mentor junior engineers, and engage with the open-source community. Enjoy a fully remote work environment, generous benefits, and opportunities for professional development.

Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a homelab)

About Grafana Labs

You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity

Responsibilities

• Deliver significant technical projects, taking well-scoped, multi-month initiatives from problem framing through rollout.
• Own major components of Tempo, contributing to and owning parts of ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Build APIs for humans and agents, helping shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces.
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship
• Collaboration and clear writing. You contribute through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, and you communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment

Requirements

• Customer focus and pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate
• Technical ownership. A track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and of helping the teammates around you grow
• Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore
• Solid systems experience. Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar
• Strong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Solid experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems
• 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 in a fully remote, globally distributed team

Preferred

• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents)
• 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