Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

The Opportunity

We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). As we scale toward 2026, we are evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products, including App Observability, Asserts, and AI-driven assistants.

What You'll Be Doing

As a Staff Engineer, you will set the technical direction for Tempo and solve complex architectural challenges:

• Lead Technical Initiatives: Drive multi-quarter projects from framing to rollout, such as trace aggregation APIs and autoscaling cells.
• Own Architecture: Manage core components including ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Make trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Design APIs: Shape interfaces for humans and AI agents to ensure Tempo remains a reliable, discoverable data source.
• Operational Excellence: Own outcomes against SLOs, reduce toil through automation, and participate in on-call rotations.
• Collaborate: Partner with Product and sibling teams (App Observability, Asserts) to unblock development and ship high-impact features.
• Mentor: Raise the engineering bar through code reviews, design feedback, and technical writing.
• Open Source: Engage with the community and steer the Tempo project in the open.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Technical Leadership: Proven track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Systems Experience: Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems (ingestion, storage, query engines).
• Software Craftsmanship: Ability to write clean, performant, and maintainable code.
• Go Proficiency: Strong Go skills, or deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) with a clear path to Go.
• Operational Mindset: Experience owning production services, managing SLOs, and reducing incident recurrence.
• Communication: Ability to lead through design docs and asynchronous collaboration in a remote environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience with OpenTelemetry, tracing, or large-scale observability.
• Background in designing query languages or APIs for programmatic/AI consumption.
• Experience with columnar storage (e.g., Parquet) or multi-tenant Kubernetes infrastructure.
• Active contributor to open-source projects.

Why Grafana Labs?

• 100% Remote: A global, collaborative culture with team members across 40+ countries.
• Innovation-Driven: High trust, low ego environment with autonomy to ship great work.
• Developer Productivity: Access to modern AI coding assistants and frontier models with a company-funded budget.
• Balance: 30 days of annual leave, including company-wide shutdown days.