Grafana Labs

1 week 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: 23 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

Website LinkedIn

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Grafana Labs

1 week 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: 23 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

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

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

Website LinkedIn