Staff Engineer, Tempo Databases — Remote

Grafana Labs; Ireland; Remote; EUR 117,600 - 141,120; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus (if applicable)

Remote work

30 days annual leave

Grafana Shutdown Days

Job summary

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Tempo Databases in Ireland. This fully remote role focuses on building a scalable tracing backend and a platform that powers Grafana’s observability products.

You’ll lead large, multi-quarter initiatives and shape Tempo’s APIs for humans and AI agents. You will own architecture for ingestion, storage, and query, drive operational excellence, and mentor engineers in a fully remote team.

Qualifications

• Strong Go experience in production systems.
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and working in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout (trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, query engine improvements).
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Design APIs for humans and agents to enable downstream products and AI workflows.
• Drive operational excellence with concrete SLOs and automation to reduce toil.
• Mentor engineers and participate in on-call incidents; contribute to open source.

Skills

Go

Distributed systems

Open source

Mentorship

Job description

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Software Engineer for Tempo Databases in Ireland. This fully remote role focuses on building a scalable tracing backend and a platform that powers Grafana’s observability products.

You’ll lead large, multi-quarter initiatives and shape Tempo’s APIs for humans and AI agents. You will own architecture for ingestion, storage, and query, drive operational excellence, and mentor engineers in a fully remote team.