Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

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 connects profiling data with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack.

This is a fully remote position for candidates based in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, or Ireland. The role involves building and operating distributed database components, shaping the product roadmap, contributing to open source, and improving the reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of Pyroscope.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects from concept through rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core distributed database components covering ingestion, storage, and query.
• Make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity.
• Participate in customer calls and translate customer pain points into actionable deliverables.
• Shape the product roadmap in an environment without a dedicated product manager.
• Drive operational excellence 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 teams.
• Support teammates through design discussions, code reviews, and pairing.
• Participate in an EMEA on-call rotation for the services developed.
• Contribute to the Pyroscope open-source project, review external contributions, and engage with the community.
• Work on initiatives including Adaptive Profiles, large-query handling, trace-to-profile correlation, agent-ready APIs and CLI tooling, BYOC and regional cell 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 other programming languages is also relevant.
• Experience building and operating cloud services and distributed systems in production.
• Understanding of operating fast, reliable, and cost-effective multi-tenant data systems.
• Product sense and comfort working directly with customers and ambiguity.
• Strong software craftsmanship, including the ability to write 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 approach to breaking complex problems into short feedback loops, delivering MVPs, and iterating.
• Clear written communication and the ability to work effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience with profiling and performance-engineering tools such as flamegraphs, pprof, or perf.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI or LLM consumers, including structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, and deterministic outputs.
• Open-source contribution or maintainer 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

• Annual compensation in Germany of €97,034–€116,441, with actual compensation varying by level, experience, and skills.
• Restricted Stock Units included with all roles.
• Global remote-first culture with asynchronous, written collaboration.
• Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants.
• In-person onboarding.
• 30 days of annual leave, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
• Career growth pathways and an open-source-oriented work environment.
• Equal-opportunity employment.