Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Tempo

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company that builds observability tooling used by millions worldwide. The Tempo team develops an open source distributed tracing backend that is scalable, user-friendly, and integrates with Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). The team focuses on backend development, collaborating with customers and Grafana Cloud teams to support Tempo both on-premises and at scale in the cloud.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and iterate on improvements
• Lead projects from concept through implementation and provide ongoing customer support
• Design, build, operate, and maintain systems to ensure reliability, performance, and availability
• Influence product roadmap and own career objectives
• Participate in on-call rotations and operate the services you oversee
• Support and mentor team members, engage in design conversations, and work closely with colleagues
• Deepen knowledge of Grafana Cloud products and Tempo codebase

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana Labs uses Go, but familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar translates well
• Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, brainstorming, and shipping products
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud, or experience with systems engineering
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is maintainable by others
• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks, or familiarity with infrastructure as code
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in a remote, collaborative team

Bonus

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including being on-call)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a strong desire to learn
• Experience working in a fully remote, distributed environment across multiple time zones

About Tempo and Team Projects

• Tempo is an open source distributed tracing backend used to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and correlate traces with logs and metrics
• Team projects include creating and operating distributed systems for tracing ingestion and queries, developing TraceQL (a query language inspired by PromQL and LogQL), and improving the metrics-generator component that generates metrics from ingested traces

Compensation & Benefits

• In the United States, base compensation range for this role: USD 168,256 - USD 201,907. Actual compensation may vary by level, experience, and skillset
• All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Additional benefits and bonus (if applicable) are listed on the company careers page
• Remote-first company with global annual leave policy (30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days). In-person onboarding is provided

Equal Opportunity & Recruitment Notes

• Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and will consider applicants regardless of protected characteristics
• The company may utilize AI tools to assist in recruitment, with manual review by the recruitment team

Location & Timezone

• This is a remote opportunity for applicants located in the United States time zones, with a strong preference for Eastern Standard Time (EST).