Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

Grafana Labs

2d•$154,445 - $185,334•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Tempo team. Tempo is an open-source distributed tracing backend that integrates with the Grafana stack to provide unified observability. The role involves contributing to the architectural evolution of Tempo, focusing on product and operational excellence, and transforming it into a platform that powers Grafana's next-generation observability products. This is a remote position for candidates in the US and Canada.

Requirements

Technical ownership: A track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects spanning design, delivery, and operations, and helping teammates grow.
Solid systems experience: Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar).
Strong software craftsmanship: Ability to write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and knowing when to optimize vs. when to ship.
Strong Go, or a path to it: Solid experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
Operational mindset: Experience owning production services, carrying a pager, reducing toil, and treating SLOs as a product feature.
Customer focus and pragmatism: Ability to break complex problems into short feedback loops (analyze, design, deliver MVP, learn, iterate).
Collaboration and clear writing: Ability to contribute through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, and communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically.
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.

Responsibilities

Own technical direction on the hardest problems in the roadmap and raise the bar across the team.
Deliver significant technical projects, taking multi-month initiatives from problem framing through rollout.
Own major components of Tempo, including ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
Write and present design docs, participate in design reviews, and make sound trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
Build APIs for humans and agents to shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces.
Contribute to operational excellence by owning outcomes against concrete SLOs and helping move the team toward Zero Ops.
Collaborate with Product and sibling teams to understand Tempo's consumption and ship unblocking features.
Mentor and support engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing.
Participate in on-call for services built and contribute to incident response and learning.
Contribute to open source Tempo, engage the community, and review external contributions.