Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to work on Pyroscope, its open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. Pyroscope provides code-level visibility into application CPU and memory usage and integrates profiling data with metrics, logs, and traces.

This is a fully remote position for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, or Ireland. The role involves owning projects end to end, shaping the product roadmap, and building and operating distributed database systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects from concept through rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core distributed database components covering ingestion, storage, and query.
• Make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity.
• Participate in customer calls and translate customer pain points into deliverables.
• Own outcomes against service-level objectives and unit-cost targets.
• Reduce operational toil through automation and improve on-call reliability.
• Partner with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Databases teams.
• Support teammates through design discussions, code reviews, and pairing.
• Participate in the EMEA on-call rotation for the services you build.
• Contribute to the Pyroscope open-source project, review external contributions, and engage with the community.
• Work with AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups, subject to security guidelines.

Example projects include Adaptive Profiles, large-query fairness and autoscaling, trace-to-profile correlation, agent-ready APIs and CLI tooling, BYOC and region automation, and OpenTelemetry-native profiling.

Requirements

• Solid experience with a systems programming language. Pyroscope is written in Go; experience with Go or another language such as Rust, C, C++, Python, or Java is relevant.
• Experience building and operating production cloud services and distributed systems.
• Understanding of multi-tenant data systems and how to keep them fast, reliable, and affordable.
• Strong product sense and comfort communicating with customers, working with ambiguity, and breaking complex problems into manageable deliverables.
• Strong software craftsmanship, including writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
• An operational mindset, including experience carrying a pager, performing SRE-style work, or working with infrastructure as code.
• Pragmatic engineering approach using short feedback loops to analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, and iterate.
• Clear written communication and the ability to work effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering, including flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tools.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI or LLM consumers, including structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, and deterministic outputs.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
• Experience using Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar tools on call or in a homelab.
• Experience working in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Benefits

• Salary range in Sweden of SEK 775,444 to SEK 930,533 per year.
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Remote-first, global culture with asynchronous work and regular video meetings.
• In-person onboarding.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days where applicable.
• Career growth opportunities and an empowered, high-trust working environment.