Senior Backend Engineer (Databases Pyroscope)

Join Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will own meaningful projects end to end, design and operate core components of a distributed database, and drive operational excellence. You will also partner across Grafana, support your teammates, and contribute to open source. Enjoy benefits such as 30 days of paid vacation, healthcare coverage, retirement planning, professional development, and a fully remote work environment.

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query.
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation.
• Clear communication. You work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code
• Curiosity and courage. Pyroscope is nearing feature completeness while still refining product-market fit. We need someone who asks hard questions and challenges the status quo when appropriate
• Operational mindset. You have carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code, and treat reliability as a feature
• Pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate
• Distributed systems in production. You have built and operated cloud services and understand what it takes to keep a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable
• Solid experience with a systems language. We write Pyroscope in Go; experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc)
• Product sense. You are comfortable talking to customers, sitting with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables. Since we have no dedicated PM, this matters as much as your code
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize versus when to ship
• Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tooling
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs
• Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar in a previous role (or on a homelab)