Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior Engineer on Pyroscope. Pyroscope is an open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles, providing engineers code-level visibility into how applications use CPU and memory (down to the specific line of code) and connecting that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack.

This is a remote position. The company is looking for candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Ireland only.

Grafana Labs describes itself as a 100% remote company with a global, asynchronous culture.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, e.g. read path efficiency improvement or trace-to-profile correlation, covering design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database—ingestion, storage, and query—making performance, cost, and complexity trade-offs.
• Wear the product hat: there is no dedicated PM; engineers join customer calls, translate pain points into deliverables, and shape the roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence: own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil via automation, and make on-call quieter each quarter.
• Partner across Grafana with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work.
• Support teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, including incident response and post-incident learning.
• Contribute to open source: Pyroscope is OSS, involving engagement with the community and reviewing external contributions.

The company also notes heavy investment in developer productivity, including support for modern AI coding assistants and access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1).

Requirements

• Solid experience with a systems language: Pyroscope is written in Go, and you should have experience with one or more programming languages (e.g., Rust, C, C++, Python, Java).
• Distributed systems in production: built and operated cloud services; understand keeping a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable.
• Product sense: comfortable with customers and ambiguity; able to break fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables (important because there is no dedicated PM).
• Curiosity and courage: the team is refining product-market fit while approaching feature completeness.
• Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, performant software others can maintain; know when to optimize vs. ship.
• Operational mindset: carried a pager; done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code; treat reliability as a feature.
• Pragmatism: break complex problems into short feedback loops (analyze, design, deliver MVP, learn, iterate).
• Clear communication: work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead via writing, reviews, and shipped code.

Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• RSUs / ownership: all roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• In-person onboarding (the posting says they want you to thrive from day 1 with fellow new “Grafanistas”).
• Balance is Key: global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.
• Open Source Roots
• Transparent Communication
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership