Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

📍 Germany
📍 Spain
📍 United Kingdom
📍 Ireland
📍 Sweden

EUR 83,000-99,600 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
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1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 4 API @ 4 Communication @ 6 Go @ 4 Grafana @ 4 IaC Java @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM @ 4 Observability @ 4 OpenTelemetry @ 4 Profiling @ 4 Prometheus @ 4 Python @ 4 Rust @ 4 SRE @ 4 Security

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 across the Grafana stack.

The role focuses on building and operating distributed database components for ingestion, storage, and querying, while improving scalability, cost efficiency, onboarding, and integration with Grafana products. Engineers own projects end to end, contribute to product direction, participate in customer discussions, and contribute to the Pyroscope open-source community.

Responsibilities

Lead projects from concept through rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
Design, build, and operate core distributed database components for ingestion, storage, and query.
Make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity.
Translate customer pain points into deliverable product improvements and help shape the roadmap.
Drive operational excellence through SLO ownership, unit cost targets, automation, and toil reduction.
Partner with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Databases squads.
Support teammates through design discussions, code review, and pairing in a fully remote environment.
Participate in the EMEA on-call rotation for the services developed.
Contribute to Pyroscope as an open-source project, including community engagement and review of external contributions.
Work on initiatives including Adaptive Profiles, large-query execution and autoscaling, trace-to-profile correlation, agent-ready APIs and CLI tooling, BYOC and region automation, and OpenTelemetry-native profiling.
Use AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups within security guidelines.

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 and how to keep them fast, reliable, and affordable.
Product sense and comfort speaking 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 delivery habits, using short feedback loops to analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, and iterate.
Clear written and verbal communication 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, and deterministic outputs for AI or LLM consumers.
Open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
Experience using Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar tools in an on-call role or homelab.
Experience working in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Work Environment

This is a 100% remote role on a remote-first, globally distributed team. The team works primarily asynchronously and in writing, with regular video meetings. The role includes participation in an EMEA on-call rotation and in-person onboarding.

Compensation

The compensation range for this role in Spain is €82,988–€99,586 annually. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skills. The role also includes Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Benefits

100% remote global culture.
Career growth pathways.
30 days of annual leave per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
In-person onboarding.
RSUs for all roles.