Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout (e.g. trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, query engine improvements)
• ▹Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation
• ▹Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity
• ▹Design APIs for both humans and agents
• ▹Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB)
• ▹Partner with Product and sibling teams (App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, Grafana Assistant)
• ▹Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing on hard problems
• ▹Participate in on-call, contribute to open source

Requirements

• ▹Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives
• ▹Deep hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution
• ▹Strong software craftsmanship, writing clean, robust, performant software
• ▹Strong Go, or deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) that translates well
• ▹Operational mindset: owning production services, carrying a pager, treating SLOs as a product feature
• ▹Customer focus and pragmatism, breaking complex problems into short feedback loops
• ▹Leadership through writing and collaboration rather than hierarchy

Nice to have

• ▹Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems
• ▹Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or programmatically consumable APIs
• ▹Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g. Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats
• ▹Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes
• ▹Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints
• ▹Open-source contribution or maintainership
• ▹Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo
• ▹Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) with every role
• ▹Canada compensation range: CAD 186,368 - CAD 223,642
• ▹Remote-first team with an async, writing-based culture

About the company

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, building Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform. More than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers - including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce - trust Grafana Labs to ensure the reliability of their systems. It's a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors.