Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo

📍 Canada
📍 United States

USD 175,000-210,000 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 @ 7 API @ 4 Communication @ 7 Grafana @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM @ 4 Observability @ 4 OpenTelemetry @ 4 Parquet @ 4 Prometheus @ 4 Rust @ 7 SQL @ 4

Details

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to work on Tempo, its open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. The role focuses on evolving Tempo into a scalable platform for observability products, AI-driven assistants, and external integrations.

The position is remote, with candidates sought in the United States and Canada. The team works asynchronously, collaboratively, and in the open-source community.

Responsibilities

Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, including trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, and query engine improvements.
Own the architecture of core Tempo components, including ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
Drive design reviews and make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity.
Design structured, deterministic, and discoverable APIs for products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators.
Drive operational excellence against SLOs such as P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost of ownership per ingested GB.
Improve automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and Zero Ops practices.
Partner with Product and sibling teams, including App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant.
Mentor engineers through code reviews, design feedback, pairing, and technical writing.
Participate in on-call for the services developed by the team and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.
Contribute to the Tempo open-source project, review external contributions, and engage with the community.
Use AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups, while maintaining strong code review and quality standards.

Example Problems

Extending TraceQL metrics and designing LLM-friendly response types.
Making Tempo a first-class data source for Grafana's AI assistant.
Building end-to-end autoscaling with customer limits, Tempo cells, hysteresis, predictive scaling, and safe scale-down.
Supporting bursty, high-cardinality, agent-generated workloads.
Improving query performance through new data formats, smarter query pipelines, targeted optimizations, and 30-day query ranges.
Building parameterized rollouts, push-button deployments, and multi-cell operational tooling.
Improving customer-facing configuration and observability to reduce escalations.

Requirements

A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations.
Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution systems.
Strong software craftsmanship, including writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
Strong Go experience, or experience with other systems languages such as Rust, C, or C++ with a path to Go.
Experience owning production services, participating in on-call, reducing operational toil, and using SLOs as a product feature.
Customer focus and a pragmatic approach based on short feedback loops, MVP delivery, learning, and iteration.
Strong written and verbal communication skills for design documents, reviews, shipped code, and fully remote asynchronous collaboration.

Bonus Qualifications

Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
Experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or programmatic APIs for services and agents.
Experience with columnar storage formats such as Parquet or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.
Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
Experience building structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, or evaluation harnesses for AI and LLM consumers.
Open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
Experience using Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo on-call.
Experience working in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Benefits

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
Remote-first global culture.
Career growth pathways.
In-person onboarding.
Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants.

Compensation

The United States compensation range is $174,986–$209,983 USD per year. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset. Compensation ranges and benefits are country-specific.