Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases Tempo | USA | Remote

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company that builds observability tools used by millions worldwide. The Tempo team develops Tempo, an open source distributed tracing backend used for searching traces, generating metrics from spans, and connecting tracing data with logs and metrics. The team focuses on backend development, collaborating with customers and Grafana Cloud teams to provide Tempo for on-premises and cloud scale use.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and iterate on improvements
• Lead projects from concept through implementation and ongoing customer support
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems with attention to reliability, performance, and availability
• Influence product and team roadmap and define personal career objectives
• Participate in on-call rotations and take responsibility for services you own
• Support and mentor team members and participate in design discussions
• Expand your skill set by learning the cloud products, customers, and codebase

Requirements

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

Bonus Points

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

Technologies & Concepts Mentioned

• Tempo (Grafana distributed tracing backend)
• TraceQL (query language for traces)
• metrics-generator (component that generates metrics from traces)
• Go (primary), Python, C, C++, Rust
• Distributed systems, distributed tracing, observability, microservices
• Cloud-native development, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana
• SRE / on-call / infrastructure as code

Compensation & Rewards

• United States base compensation range: USD 168,256 - USD 201,907 (actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset assessed in interview)
• Roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and may include bonus and other benefits

Work Location & Other Notes

• This is a remote opportunity restricted to applicants in USA time zones (strong preference for Eastern Time)
• Grafana Labs is remote-first and operates with asynchronous communications and regular video calls
• The company emphasizes open-source roots, transparency, autonomy, and a collaborative culture

Equal Opportunity

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of protected characteristics. The company may utilize AI tools to assist in recruitment, with manual review of CVs by the recruitment team.