Staff Software Engineer, Tempo Databases — Remote

Grafana Labs; Germany (OH); On-site; USD 125,266 - 150,320; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Equity

Bonus (if applicable)

Career growth

Job summary

Grafana Labs seeks a Staff Software Engineer to help drive Tempo, Grafana's distributed tracing backend. You will lead cross‑team initiatives, own core Tempo components such as ingestion, storage, and query, and shape architecture balancing performance and cost.

This fully remote role demands deep systems experience, strong Go skills, and a track record mentoring engineers, improving SLOs, and delivering OSS. You will collaborate with product teams to enable next‑gen observability.

Qualifications

• Technical leadership demonstrated on multi‑quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery and operations.
• Deep hands‑on experience building and operating distributed data systems (ingestion, storage, query).
• Strong Go or path to Go; experience with other systems languages is a plus.
• Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, maintainable code with thoughtful optimization decisions.
• Operational mindset: ownership of production services, pager duty, toil reduction and SLOs as a product feature.
• Customer focus and pragmatism: break complex problems into fast feedback loops and iterations.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi‑quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout (trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, etc.).
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, metrics generation; drive design reviews and trade‑offs.
• Design APIs for humans and agents to enable downstream products and AI assistants.
• Drive operational excellence with concrete SLOs and automation to reduce toil and incidents.
• Partner with Product and Grafana teams to understand consumption and unblock initiatives.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and design feedback.
• Participate in on‑call and contribute to post‑incident learning; contribute to open source.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Go programming

Code review

Mentoring

Job description

Grafana Labs seeks a Staff Software Engineer to help drive Tempo, Grafana's distributed tracing backend. You will lead cross‑team initiatives, own core Tempo components such as ingestion, storage, and query, and shape architecture balancing performance and cost.

This fully remote role demands deep systems experience, strong Go skills, and a track record mentoring engineers, improving SLOs, and delivering OSS. You will collaborate with product teams to enable next‑gen observability.