Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

the team. Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, 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 “why” for

the team. Design APIs for humans and agents. Shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably. Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push

the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts. Partner with Product and sibling teams. Work closely with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them. Mentor engineers. Raise the engineering bar through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing that leaves

the team smarter than you found it. Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning. Contribute to open source. Tempo is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open. We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro). Example problems you could work on These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026. Any one of them is a Staff-sized problem: Trace aggregation and higher-density APIs: extend TraceQL metrics, design LLM-friendly response types, and make Tempo a first-class data source for Grafana’s AI assistant. Autoscaling end to end: customer limits and Tempo cells, with hysteresis, predictive scaling for spikes, and safe scale-down. Agent-scale ingestion and query: guardrails for bursty, high-cardinality, agent-generated workloads. Query performance: new data formats, smarter query pipelines, targeted optimizations for common Drilldown and Traces workflows, and 30-day query ranges. Rollouts and multi-cell operations: parameterized rollouts, push-button deploys, and the tooling to grow safely into triple-digit cell counts without a proportional increase in alert noise. Limits and self-service: drive customer-facing configuration and observability so escalations trend toward zero. What Makes You a Great Fit: Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and made the teams around you better. Deep systems experience. Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar. Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship. Strong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well. Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore. Customer focus and pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate. Leadership through writing and collaboration. You lead through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, not hierarchy. You communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Points For: Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems. Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents). Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads. Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes. Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses. Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open. Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a homelab). Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

How we work We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on

the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product. In the United States, the

compensation range for this role is $174,986 - $209,983 USD. Actual

compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally. *

Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range &

benefits at the beginning of the process. Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs: 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape

how we work. Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow

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