Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

📍 Germany
📍 Spain
📍 United Kingdom
📍 Ireland
📍 Sweden

EUR 117,600-141,100 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 Grafana @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM @ 4 Observability @ 4 OpenTelemetry @ 4 Parquet @ 4 Prometheus @ 4 Rust @ 7 SQL @ 4 Security

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to work on Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Tempo enables trace search, span-to-metric generation, and connections between tracing data, logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.

The role focuses on evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform for Grafana’s next generation of observability products, while improving product reliability, operational excellence, performance, APIs, and support for AI-driven workflows. The position is remote and open to applicants located in Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland, or Germany.

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 human users, agents, Grafana 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 gigabyte.
Improve automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and Zero Ops practices.
Partner with Product and teams working on App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant.
Mentor engineers through code reviews, design feedback, pairing, and technical writing.
Participate in on-call for services developed by the team and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.
Contribute to the open-source Tempo project, review external contributions, and engage with the community.
Work on projects involving trace aggregation, higher-density APIs, TraceQL metrics, autoscaling, agent-scale ingestion and querying, query performance, multi-cell operations, customer limits, and self-service configuration.
Use AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups within security guidelines.

Requirements

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 the ability to write clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
Strong Go experience, or substantial experience with other systems languages such as Rust, C, or C++ and a path to learning Go.
Experience owning production services, participating in on-call, reducing operational toil, and treating SLOs as a product feature.
Customer-focused and pragmatic approach, with the ability to deliver MVPs, learn from feedback, and iterate.
Clear written and verbal communication and the ability to lead through design documents, reviews, and shipped code in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Qualifications

Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
Experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or APIs consumed programmatically by services or 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 or 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 or in a homelab.
Experience working in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Compensation & Benefits

The base compensation range in the Republic of Ireland is EUR 117,600–141,120 per year. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skill set. Benefits include equity, bonus where applicable, and other company benefits.

Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with a global culture, transparent communication, an open-source focus, career growth pathways, in-person onboarding, and a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, subject to local legislation.