Used Tools & Technologies
Not specified
Required Skills & Competences
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.
Grafana @ 4
Kubernetes @ 4
Prometheus @ 4
SQL @ 4
Leadership @ 4
Communication @ 7
Parquet @ 4
Rust @ 4
API @ 4
Technical Leadership @ 4
LLM @ 4
OpenTelemetry @ 4
Observability @ 4
AI @ 4
- 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.
Details
Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform. We are a 100% remote company with a global team. Tempo is the open-source distributed tracing backend used by Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo enables searching traces, generating metrics from spans, and connecting tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.
This is a remote opportunity; we are particularly interested in applicants located in Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland, or Germany.
Responsibilities
- Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout (e.g., trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells, query engine improvements).
- Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Drive design reviews and document trade-offs.
- Design APIs for humans and agents; shape Tempo’s interfaces so downstream products and agents can build on it reliably.
- Drive operational excellence: own outcomes against concrete SLOs (e.g., P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push the team toward automation and toil reduction.
- Partner with Product and sibling teams (App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, Grafana Assistant) to understand consumers of Tempo and ship what unblocks them.
- Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing, and clear technical writing.
- Participate in on-call for services you help build and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.
- Contribute to the open-source Tempo project: engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project publicly.
Requirements
- Technical leadership: proven track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations.
- Deep systems experience: substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar).
- Strong software craftsmanship: ability to write clean, robust, performant, maintainable software and make pragmatic trade-offs between optimization and shipping.
- Strong Go experience, or a clear path to Go. Experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
- Operational mindset: experience owning production services, carrying pager duties, reducing toil, and treating SLOs as product features.
- Customer focus and pragmatism: break complex problems into short feedback loops and iterate from MVP to production.
- Strong written communication for a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
Bonus
- Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
- Experience designing query languages or SQL/TraceQL-like engines and APIs intended to be consumed programmatically.
- Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.
- Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
- Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, and evaluation harnesses.
- Open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
- Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
- Experience working in fully remote, globally distributed teams.
How We Work
- Remote-first, asynchronous collaboration with regular video meetings.
- Emphasis on clear written communication, autonomy, and trust.
- Developer productivity investments, optional AI coding assistants with company-funded usage budget and access to frontier models.
- In-person onboarding to help new hires integrate with the team.
Compensation & Rewards
- Germany base compensation range for this role: EUR 109,709 - EUR 131,651. Actual compensation varies by level, experience, and market. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits listed by Grafana Labs.
Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs
- 100% remote global culture, scaling organization, transparent communication, innovation-driven environment, open-source roots, empowered teams, career growth pathways, approachable leadership, and generous annual leave (30 days per annum with 3 reserved for company shutdown days).