Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

📍 Germany
📍 Spain
📍 United Kingdom
📍 Ireland
📍 Sweden

GBP 91,800-110,100 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

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 Distributed Systems @ 4 Go @ 4 Grafana @ 4 IaC Java @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM @ 4 OSS Observability @ 4 OpenTelemetry @ 4 Profiling @ 4 Prometheus @ 4 Python @ 4 Rust @ 4 SRE @ 6

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: there is no dedicated PM; engineers 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 teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, treating incident response and post-incident learning as part of the craft.
Contribute to open source: Pyroscope is OSS; engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

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, sitting with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables.
Curiosity and courage: Pyroscope is nearing feature completeness while refining product-market fit.
Strong software craftsmanship: write clean, robust, performant software others can maintain; know when to optimize vs. when to 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: lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code.

Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tooling.
Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs.
Open-source contribution or maintainership; comfort engaging a community in the open.
Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar (or on a homelab).
Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.