Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Grafana Labs seeks a Staff Software Engineer for Tempo, the open-source tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces. You will lead multi-quarter initiatives, own core Tempo components, and design human and agent APIs.

This is a remote role: applicants in eligible regions worldwide are welcome, with emphasis on global collaboration. You will collaborate with Product and App Observability teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to open source.

Qualifications

• Technical leadership in multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience building and operating distributed data systems.
• Strong Go programming language expertise or path to it.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout.
• 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 assistants.
• Drive operational excellence with defined SLOs and automation.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams to understand Tempo consumption and unblock teams.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to open source.

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 opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland or Germany.

Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Tempo

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 strong code review and quality standards.

You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT‑5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1).

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 ex