Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

Details

Responsibilities

As a Senior Engineer on Pyroscope, you will own meaningful projects end to end and help shape what the team builds next.

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, e.g. Read path efficiency improvement, or trace-to-profile correlation, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Wear the product hat. We have no dedicated PM: engineers on this team join customer calls, translate pain points into manageable deliverables, and directly shape the roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter.
• Partner across Grafana. Work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and the other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work.
• Support your teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, and treat incident response and post-incident learning as part of the craft.
• Contribute to open source. Pyroscope is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.

We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1).

Requirements

• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• Curiosity and courage. Pyroscope is nearing feature completeness while still refining product-market fit.
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize versus when to ship.
• 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.
• Clear communication. You work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code.

Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• Balance is Key: global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum (3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days)

In Ireland, the compensation range for this role is €104,000 - €124,800. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success.