Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives (trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, query engine improvements)
• ▹Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, metrics generation
• ▹Drive design reviews and make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost and complexity
• ▹Design APIs for both humans and AI agents
• ▹Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB)
• ▹Mentor engineers, review code, partner with PMs and sibling teams, 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, storage, query execution)
• ▹Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, performant, maintainable code
• ▹Strong Go, or deep experience in another systems language (Rust, C, C++)
• ▹Operational mindset: has carried a pager, reduced toil, treated SLOs as a product feature
• ▹Customer focus and pragmatism, working in short feedback loops

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, metadata/discovery endpoints
• ▹Open-source contribution or maintainership

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹100% remote, global company culture
• ▹Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) and bonus eligibility
• ▹30 days annual leave including 3 company Shutdown Days
• ▹Career growth pathways
• ▹Company-funded AI coding assistants (e.g. Claude Code, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot)
• ▹US compensation range: USD 174,986 - 209,983

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 trusted 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.