Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

Details

Grafana Labs is seeking 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 evolving Pyroscope's distributed database and making profiling easier to use, more scalable, and more deeply integrated with Grafana and OpenTelemetry. The position is fully remote and supports 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 distributed database components covering ingestion, storage, and query workloads.
• Make trade-offs involving performance, cost, scalability, and complexity.
• Participate in customer calls and translate customer needs into deliverable product improvements.
• Own outcomes against service-level objectives and unit-cost targets, reduce operational toil, and improve on-call operations.
• Partner with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Grafana database teams.
• 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, including community engagement and reviewing external contributions.
• Work on initiatives such as 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.

Requirements

• Strong 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 distributed cloud services in production.
• Understanding of multi-tenant data systems and how to keep them fast, reliable, and cost-effective.
• Product sense and comfort working directly with customers, ambiguity, and roadmap decisions.
• Strong software craftsmanship, including writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
• An operational mindset, including pager duty, SRE-style work, or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Pragmatic approach to breaking complex problems into short feedback loops involving analysis, design, delivery, learning, and iteration.
• Clear written communication and ability to work asynchronously in a fully remote environment.

Bonus Points

• Profiling and performance-engineering experience with flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tools.
• 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 deterministic outputs for AI and LLM consumers.
• 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

• UK compensation range of £91,755–£110,106 per year, plus Restricted Stock Units.
• Fully remote work and a global, asynchronous culture.
• Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants and access to frontier models.
• In-person onboarding.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days.
• Career growth opportunities and an open-source-focused working environment.

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer.