Remote Staff Backend Engineer, Tempo Databases & Tracing

Grafana; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Engineer to set technical direction on Tempo, the open-source tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives, own the architecture of ingestion, storage, and query, and mentor engineers across the team.

Join a remote-first team building scalable, AI-aware observability tooling and contribute to open source while partnering with product and other Grafana teams to deliver high-impact outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout (e.g., trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, or query engine improvements).
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Design APIs for humans and agents to enable Tempo integrations and AI-assisted workflows.
• Drive operational excellence with concrete SLOs and automated tooling to reduce toil and incidents.
• Partner with Product and other Grafana teams to understand Tempo consumption and unblock product needs.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing on hard problems.
• Participate in on-call duties and contribute to post-incident learning.
• Contribute to open source; engage the community and guide the project in the open.

Job description

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Engineer to set technical direction on Tempo, the open-source tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives, own the architecture of ingestion, storage, and query, and mentor engineers across the team.

Join a remote-first team building scalable, AI-aware observability tooling and contribute to open source while partnering with product and other Grafana teams to deliver high-impact outcomes.