Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs
Germany, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland
Workplace: RemoteFull timeEUR 109,709 - 131,651Function: Software EngineeringSkills: ["Technical leadership","Systems thinking","Software craftsmanship","Operational mindset","Collaboration"]

Lead technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Over the next year, drive multi-quarter initiatives spanning trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling and parameterized rollouts, improved query performance, and agent-ready ingestion and interfaces. Own core Tempo architecture (ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation), set SLO-driven outcomes, mentor engineers, and partner across product teams while contributing to open source.

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FursaFursa
Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs
1 month ago

Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

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Last checked: 8 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Over the next year, drive multi-quarter initiatives spanning trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling and parameterized rollouts, improved query performance, and agent-ready ingestion and interfaces. Own core Tempo architecture (ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation), set SLO-driven outcomes, mentor engineers, and partner across product teams while contributing to open source.
Location: Germany, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering

Key Responsibilities

  • •Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, including APIs, autoscaling, query engine improvements, or related efforts.
  • •Own the architecture of core Tempo components (ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation), driving design reviews and documenting trade-offs.
  • •Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for humans and agents so downstream products and integrators can build reliably.
  • •Drive operational excellence by setting and owning outcomes against concrete SLOs and moving toward Zero Ops through automation and actionable alerts.
  • •Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and contributing to incident response via on-call and post-incident learning.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: EUR 109,709 - 131,651
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:Equity

Key Requirements

  • •Track record leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives across design, delivery, and operations that raise the bar for the team.
  • •Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (ingestion, storage engines, or query execution).
  • •Strong software craftsmanship: write clean, robust, performant software and know when to optimize vs. ship.
  • •Strong Go experience (or a path to it), with transferable systems-language experience such as Rust, C, or C++.
  • •Operational mindset: own production services, handle on-call, reduce toil, and treat SLOs as a product feature.
Experience:Open sourceObservabilityDistributed tracingLarge-scale systemsSaaS
Skills:Technical leadershipSystems thinkingSoftware craftsmanshipOperational mindsetCollaboration
Tech Stack:GoRustCC++SQLTraceQLOpenTelemetryParquetKubernetesLLM

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