Staff Backend Engineer (Databases Tempo)

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Engineer and help shape the future of observability. You will work on Tempo, an open-source distributed tracing backend, and play a key role in its evolution into a platform that powers Grafana's next generation of observability products. Your responsibilities will include setting technical direction, leading multi-quarter initiatives, owning the architecture of core Tempo components, designing APIs, driving operational excellence, partnering with product and sibling teams, mentoring engineers, participating in on-call duties, and contributing to open source. Enjoy a fully remote work environment, generous vacation and healthcare benefits, and a focus on professional development.

• Contribuer à l'évolution de Tempo en tant que plateforme, en développant des API de haute densité, l'agrégation des traces et les métriques TraceQL.
• Diriger des initiatives techniques complexes sur plusieurs trimestres, de la définition du problème à la mise en œuvre, en passant par le déploiement.
• Assurer l'excellence opérationnelle à grande échelle, en réduisant le travail manuel et en automatisant les processus.
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship
• Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore
• 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
• 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
• Deep systems experience. Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar
• Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and made the teams around you better
• 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