Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

📍 Germany

EUR 97,000-116,400 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
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AI Communication @ 6 Distributed Systems @ 4 Grafana IaC Java @ 4 OSS Observability Profiling Python @ 4 Rust @ 4 SRE @ 6 Security

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to help build Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles.

Pyroscope gives engineers code-level visibility into how applications use CPU and memory, down to the specific line of code, and connects that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack.

Responsibilities

Lead projects from concept to rollout (e.g., Read path efficiency improvement, 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: there is no dedicated PM; engineers join customer calls, translate pain points into manageable deliverables, and shape the roadmap.
Drive operational excellence by owning outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reducing toil through automation, and making on-call quieter every quarter.
Partner across Grafana (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; engage the community and review external contributions.

Requirements

Solid experience with a systems language. Pyroscope is written in Go; experience with one or more programming languages (e.g., Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc.).
Distributed systems in production: built and operated cloud services; understand what it takes to keep a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable.
Product sense: comfortable talking to customers, working with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables.
Curiosity and courage.
Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, performant software that 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 an MVP, learn, iterate).
Clear communication in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

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, with 3 Grafana Shutdown Days reserved for disconnecting (where applicable).
Compensation includes Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants (within security guidelines).
Access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1).