Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

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, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud’s actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.

You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

This is a remote position. We are seeking candidates in US and Canada.

The Opportunity:

We build Tempo , the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.

2026 is an inflection point for Tempo. After a major architectural upgrade and the launch of TraceQL metrics, we are shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence, and evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products (App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants).

Over the next year, you will help us:

• Make Grafana Cloud Traces "just work" for customers by eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes.
• Achieve operational excellence at scale as we grow from close to 50 cells today into triple digits this year, with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and aggressive toil reduction.
• Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler: higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics math, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces that downstream products and agents can build on.
• Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges to match competitors.
• Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows, such as assistant-driven triage and "why is this slow?"- style investigations.

What You’ll Be Doing:

As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across 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