Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs
United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Germany
Workplace: RemoteFull timeGBP 103,958 - 124,750Function: Software EngineeringSkills: ["Technical leadership","Systems thinking","Software craftsmanship","Operational excellence","Collaboration"]

Set technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and related products. Lead multi-quarter initiatives spanning architecture, ingestion/storage/query, autoscaling and operational excellence, and customer-facing SLO outcomes. Design higher-density, structured APIs for humans and agents (LLM-friendly interfaces) and drive performance improvements for ingestion and 30-day query ranges. Mentor engineers, partner across product teams, participate in on-call, and contribute to Tempo’s open-source ecosystem.

Loading

Loading job details...

Preparing the role view and application actions.

FursaFursa
Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs
1 month ago

Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

✓ Verified Job

Canonical indexed version, validated from employer's careers page.

Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 8 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Set technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and related products. Lead multi-quarter initiatives spanning architecture, ingestion/storage/query, autoscaling and operational excellence, and customer-facing SLO outcomes. Design higher-density, structured APIs for humans and agents (LLM-friendly interfaces) and drive performance improvements for ingestion and 30-day query ranges. Mentor engineers, partner across product teams, participate in on-call, and contribute to Tempo’s open-source ecosystem.
Location: United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Ireland, Germany
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering
Seniority: Sr. Manager level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, including trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling and limits, and query engine improvements.
  • •Own the architecture of core Tempo components (ingestion, storage, query, metrics generation), driving design reviews and trade-offs across performance, cost, and complexity.
  • •Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for humans and agents so downstream products and external integrators can build reliably.
  • •Drive operational excellence by owning outcomes against concrete SLOs (e.g., P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and advancing automation and actionable alerts.
  • •Partner with product and sibling teams, mentor engineers through reviews and feedback, participate in on-call, and contribute to Tempo as open source.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: GBP 103,958 - 124,750
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:EquityAnnual Bonus

Key Requirements

  • •Track record leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives across design, delivery, and operations, raising the bar for the team.
  • •Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (ingestion, storage engines, query execution, or similar).
  • •Strong software craftsmanship: write clean, robust, performant systems and know when to optimize versus ship.
  • •Strong Go experience (Tempo is written in Go), or deep systems-language experience (Rust, C, C++) transferable to the role.
  • •Operational mindset: own production services, carry a pager, reduce toil, and treat SLOs as a product feature.
Experience:Distributed systemsObservabilityOpen sourceRemote workAI/LLM integrations
Skills:Technical leadershipSystems thinkingSoftware craftsmanshipOperational excellenceCollaboration
Languages:English
Tech Stack:GoRustCC++TempoGrafanaGrafana Cloud TracesGrafana Enterprise TracesTraceQLOpenTelemetrySQLKubernetesParquetPrometheusLokiGPT-5.6Claude FableGemini Pro 3.1

Company Brief

Grafana Labs
Develops open-source and commercial observability tools, including Grafana for metrics visualization, Loki for log aggregation, and Tempo for tracing, enabling organizations to monitor, analyze, and visualize system performance and telemetry data.
Industry: Developer Tools
Company Size: Enterprise (1,001+ employees)
Growth: Scaleup
Valuation: Unicorn (USD 1B+)
Funding: Series D
Headquarters: New York, United States
Founded: 2014
WebsiteLinkedIn