Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

📍 Germany
📍 Spain
📍 United Kingdom
📍 Ireland
📍 Sweden

SEK 878,600-1,054,300 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 Go @ 7 Grafana @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM @ 4 Observability @ 4 OpenTelemetry @ 4 Parquet @ 4 Prometheus @ 4 Rust @ 7 SQL @ 4 Security

Details

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help build and operate Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Tempo supports trace search, span-derived metrics, and connections between tracing data, logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.

This role will focus on evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform for Grafana's next generation of observability products, including App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants. Key priorities include operational excellence, autoscaling, higher-density APIs, TraceQL metrics, improved query performance, multi-cell operations, and support for bursty, high-cardinality AI-driven workloads.

Responsibilities

Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, such as trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells, customer limits, and query engine improvements.
Own the architecture of core Tempo components, including ingestion, storage, querying, and metrics generation.
Drive design reviews and make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity.
Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for human users, AI agents, downstream products, 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 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 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 within security guidelines.

Example projects include trace aggregation and higher-density APIs, end-to-end autoscaling, agent-scale ingestion and querying, query performance improvements, multi-cell rollout tooling, and customer-facing limits and self-service capabilities.

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 experience with Go, or deep experience in systems languages such as Rust, C, or C++ with a path to Go.
Experience owning production services, participating in on-call rotations, reducing operational toil, and working with SLOs.
Customer-focused and pragmatic approach to analyzing, designing, delivering MVPs, learning, and iterating.
Ability to lead through design documents, reviews, and shipped code rather than hierarchy.
Clear communication skills for 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 programmatic APIs.
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.

Benefits

Equity, bonus where applicable, and other company benefits.
100% remote, globally distributed work environment.
Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants.
In-person onboarding.
Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
Career growth pathways, transparent communication, empowered teams, and a high-trust culture.

The role is remote, with applicants considered from Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland, or Germany. Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer.