Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs
Ireland
Workplace: RemoteFull timeEUR 117,600 - 141,120 annuallyFunction: Software EngineeringSkills: ["Technical leadership","Code review","Collaboration","Mentorship","Communication"]

Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives for Tempo, Grafana’s open-source distributed tracing backend. Own the architecture across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation, and raise the engineering bar through design reviews, sharp performance/cost trade-offs, and strong documentation. Drive operational excellence to meet concrete SLOs, design structured APIs for humans and agents, collaborate with product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, and contribute back to the open-source community.

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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: 6 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives for Tempo, Grafana’s open-source distributed tracing backend. Own the architecture across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation, and raise the engineering bar through design reviews, sharp performance/cost trade-offs, and strong documentation. Drive operational excellence to meet concrete SLOs, design structured APIs for humans and agents, collaborate with product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, and contribute back to the open-source community.
Location: Ireland
Workplace: Remote
Employment Type: Full time
Job Function: Software Engineering

Key Responsibilities

  • •Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives for Tempo, from problem framing through rollout (e.g., trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, query engine improvements).
  • •Own the architecture of core Tempo components—ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation—driving design reviews and key trade-offs.
  • •Design APIs for humans and agents by shaping structured, deterministic, discoverable Tempo interfaces that other products and integrators can rely on.
  • •Drive operational excellence by owning outcomes against concrete SLOs and pushing toward Zero Ops via automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
  • •Mentor engineers through reviews and pairing, participate in on-call incident response, and contribute to Tempo as an open-source project.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: EUR 117,600 - 141,120 annually
Equity and Bonus:Equity
Perks:EquityAnnual Bonus

Key Requirements

  • •Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives across design, delivery, and operations, improving the teams around you.
  • •Deep hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar).
  • •Strong software craftsmanship: writing clean, robust, performant software and knowing when to optimize vs. ship.
  • •Strong Go experience (or a clear path to it); experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) is valuable.
  • •Operational mindset: owning production services, carrying a pager, reducing toil, and treating SLOs as a product feature.
Experience:ObservabilityDistributed systemsOpen sourceSaaS
Skills:Technical leadershipCode reviewCollaborationMentorshipCommunication
Languages:English
Tech Stack:TempoGrafana CloudDistributed tracingTraceQLOpenTelemetrySQLGoRustCC++KubernetesParquetPrometheusLokiGrafana Assistant

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