Staff Backend Engineer (Databases Tempo)

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Engineer for Tempo, an open-source distributed tracing backend. In this remote position, you will lead technical initiatives, own the architecture of core Tempo components, drive operational excellence, and mentor engineers. You will also contribute to open source and participate in on-call for the services you help build. Enjoy benefits such as 30 days of paid vacation, health coverage, retirement planning, professional development, and more.

• Set technical direction on complex problems in the roadmap, lead multi-quarter technical initiatives, and own the architecture of core Tempo components.
• Design APIs for humans and agents, shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces, and drive operational excellence.
• Mentor engineers, raise the engineering bar through code review, design feedback, and pairing on hard problems.
• 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
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship
• Deep systems experience. Substantial 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. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
• 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. You communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment
• Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and made the teams around you better
• Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore
• 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