Senior Backend Engineer (Databases Tempo)

Join Grafana Labs as a Senior Backend Engineer for Tempo, where you'll play a key role in enhancing our observability platform. You'll tackle complex technical challenges, own major components of Tempo, build APIs, contribute to operational excellence, collaborate with product teams, mentor engineers, and engage with the open-source community. Enjoy a fully remote work environment, generous benefits, and a focus on professional development.

Responsibilities

• Contribuer à l'excellence opérationnelle à grande échelle en réduisant le travail manuel et en améliorant l'automatisation.
• Évoluer Tempo en tant que plateforme d'activation, en développant des API à haute densité et en améliorant l'agrégation des traces.
• Livrer des projets techniques significatifs, en prenant en charge des initiatives bien définies de plusieurs mois, de la définition du problème à la mise en œuvre.
• Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore
• 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
• Solid systems experience. Significant 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. Solid experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
• 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
• 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 building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses
• 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

Preferred

• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents)
• Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open

Pay

USD 154,445 - 185,334