Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout (e.g., trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells)
• ▹Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation
• ▹Drive design reviews and sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity
• ▹Design APIs for humans and agents — structured, deterministic, discoverable interfaces
• ▹Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO)
• ▹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 for the services you help build
• ▹Contribute to the open-source Tempo project

Requirements

• ▹Track record of technical leadership on complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations
• ▹Deep, hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems (ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution)
• ▹Strong software craftsmanship — clean, robust, maintainable, performant code
• ▹Strong Go, or a path to it — deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
• ▹Operational mindset: owning production services, carrying a pager, treating SLOs as a product feature
• ▹Customer focus and pragmatism, breaking problems into short feedback loops
• ▹Leadership through writing and collaboration, communicating clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous 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
• ▹On-call experience with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo
• ▹Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹GBP 103,958 – GBP 124,750 base compensation (United Kingdom)
• ▹Equity and bonus (if applicable)
• ▹100% remote, global culture

About the company

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