Senior Backend Engineer - Databases, Pyroscope

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to work on Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. Pyroscope provides code-level visibility into how applications use CPU and memory and connects profiling data with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack.

This role will help improve Pyroscope's scalability, onboarding, Grafana integrations, AI-agent capabilities, operational excellence, and total cost of ownership. The position is fully remote and open to candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Ireland.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects from concept through rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database, including ingestion, storage, and query systems.
• Participate in customer calls, translate pain points into deliverables, and help shape the product roadmap.
• Own outcomes against service-level objectives and unit-cost targets.
• Reduce operational toil through automation and improve on-call operations.
• Partner with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Databases squads.
• 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 on projects such as Adaptive Profiles, large-query execution and autoscaling, trace-to-profile correlation, agent-ready APIs and CLI tools, BYOC and regional cell automation, and OpenTelemetry-native profiling.

Requirements

• Solid experience with a systems programming language. Pyroscope is written in Go; experience with Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, or similar languages is also relevant.
• Experience building and operating distributed cloud services in production.
• Understanding of multi-tenant data systems, performance, reliability, and cost management.
• Strong product sense and comfort working directly with customers and ambiguous requirements.
• Strong software craftsmanship, including writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
• An operational mindset, including experience carrying a pager, performing SRE-style work, or using infrastructure as code.
• Pragmatic approach to breaking complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Clear written communication and the ability to work effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering, including flamegraphs, pprof, or perf.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, or other systems for AI/LLM consumers.
• 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

• Ireland compensation range of €104,000–€124,800 per year.
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Fully remote, global working culture.
• Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants.
• In-person onboarding.
• 30 days of annual leave per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
• Career growth opportunities and a transparent, collaborative work environment.

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer.