Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs
Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany
Workplace: RemoteFull timeSEK 878,578 - 1,054,294Function: Software EngineeringSkills: ["Technical leadership","Systems thinking","Software craftsmanship","Operational ownership","Collaboration"]

Set technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Lead multi-quarter initiatives across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation—improving customer reliability, operational excellence at scale, and performance for high-volume workloads. Design core architectures and APIs for humans and agents, partner with product teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to open source within a remote-first, Go-centric environment.

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FursaFursa
Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs
1 month ago

Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

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Source: Company careers pageValidated by: Fursa AI
Last checked: 1 hour agoStatus: Live
Reposted: similar role first listed 1 month ago

Job Summary

Set technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Lead multi-quarter initiatives across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation—improving customer reliability, operational excellence at scale, and performance for high-volume workloads. Design core architectures and APIs for humans and agents, partner with product teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to open source within a remote-first, Go-centric environment.
Location: Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering
Seniority: Mid level

Key Responsibilities

  • •Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, such as trace aggregation APIs and query engine improvements.
  • •Own the architecture of Tempo components (ingestion, storage, query, metrics generation), driving design reviews and documenting trade-offs.
  • •Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for humans and agents that enable downstream products and integrators reliably.
  • •Drive operational excellence against SLOs (e.g., P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) using automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
  • •Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing that improves the team’s capability.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: SEK 878,578 - 1,054,294
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:EquityAnnual BonusPaid Leave

Key Requirements

  • •Track record leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations, raising the team’s capabilities.
  • •Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (e.g., ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution).
  • •Write clean, robust, performant software and know when to optimize versus ship.
  • •Strong Go experience (with a path to it); deep experience in other systems languages like Rust, C, or C++ translates well.
  • •Own production services with an operational mindset (e.g., owned outcomes, carried a pager, reduced toil, treated SLOs as a product feature).
Experience:Open sourceObservabilityDistributed systems
Skills:Technical leadershipSystems thinkingSoftware craftsmanshipOperational ownershipCollaboration
Tech Stack:GoRustCC++TempoGrafana CloudGrafana Enterprise TracesGrafana AssistantTraceQLOpenTelemetrySQLKubernetesParquetPrometheusLokiGPT-5.6Claude FableGemini Pro 3.1LLMAI coding assistants

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