Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | Spain | Remote

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout — e.g. trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells, or 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, and document the reasoning behind decisions.
• ▹Design APIs for both humans and agents, so future products and LLM-driven assistants can build on Tempo reliably.
• ▹Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB), pushing toward Zero Ops through automation.
• ▹Partner closely 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 and incident response, and contribute to the open-source Tempo project.

Requirements

• ▹A track record of technical leadership on complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• ▹Deep, hands-on experience operating distributed data systems in production — ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution.
• ▹Strong software craftsmanship — clean, robust, maintainable code.
• ▹Strong Go skills, or a clear path to them (experience in Rust, C or C++ also translates well).
• ▹An operational mindset: owning production services, carrying a pager, treating SLOs as a product feature.
• ▹Customer focus and pragmatism, working in short feedback loops (analyze, design, MVP, learn, iterate).
• ▹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 APIs meant to be consumed programmatically.
• ▹Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g. Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats.
• ▹Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• ▹Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, discoverable metadata endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses.
• ▹Open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
• ▹Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki or Tempo (in a previous role or a homelab).
• ▹Experience working on a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Base salary range in Spain: EUR 94,025–112,830 / year (varies by level and experience)
• ▹100% remote-first culture with teammates across 40+ countries
• ▹Company-funded budget for AI coding assistants, with access to frontier models (e.g. GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1)
• ▹Opportunity to work on and help steer the open-source Tempo project

About the company

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, built on the principles of open source, open standards and open culture. Grafana Cloud is used by more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Salesforce. The company is 100% remote, with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, backed by investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG and Lead Edge Capital.