Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | Germany | Remote

Stack

Responsibilities

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

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, maintainable code
• ▹Strong Go skills (or a path to it); deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
• ▹Operational mindset: owning production services, on-call, treating SLOs as a product feature
• ▹Customer focus and pragmatism, short feedback loops
• ▹Leadership through writing and collaboration, clear communication in a remote, async environment

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)
• ▹Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes
• ▹Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, deterministic outputs
• ▹Open-source contribution or maintainership
• ▹Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹100% remote work in a global team of 40+ countries
• ▹Company-funded AI tooling budget (frontier models e.g. GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1)
• ▹Base compensation in Germany: EUR 109,709 - EUR 131,651

About the company

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, founded on open source and open standards principles. Grafana Cloud is used by 35M+ users and 7,000+ customers including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. A 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries.