Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs
Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany
Workplace: RemoteFull timeEUR 94,025 - 112,830Function: Software EngineeringSkills: ["Technical leadership","Systems thinking","Software craftsmanship","Operational mindset","Collaboration"]

Lead technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Drive multi-quarter initiatives across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation, improving performance, scalability, and operational excellence. Design structured, deterministic APIs for humans and AI/LLM agents, set SLO-driven outcomes, collaborate with PMs and sibling teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to the open-source Tempo community.

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FursaFursa
Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs
1 month ago

Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo

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Last checked: 7 hours agoStatus: Live

Job Summary

Lead technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Drive multi-quarter initiatives across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation, improving performance, scalability, and operational excellence. Design structured, deterministic APIs for humans and AI/LLM agents, set SLO-driven outcomes, collaborate with PMs and sibling teams, mentor engineers, and contribute to the open-source Tempo community.
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, including APIs, autoscaling, and query engine improvements.
  • •Own the architecture of Tempo components (ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation), driving design reviews and documenting trade-offs.
  • •Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping structured, deterministic, discoverable interfaces for downstream products and integrators.
  • •Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs (e.g., latency, incident recurrence, TCO), moving toward automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
  • •Participate in on-call, mentor engineers through reviews and collaboration, and contribute to Tempo’s open-source community.

Pay and Benefits

Salary: EUR 94,025 - 112,830
Perks:Rsus

Key Requirements

  • •Track record leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives across design, delivery, and operations with measurable impact.
  • •Hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (e.g., ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution).
  • •Write clean, robust, high-performance software that others can maintain, with sound trade-off decisions.
  • •Strong Go experience (or a clear path to it); deep systems language experience such as Rust, C, or C++ is a plus.
  • •Operational ownership mindset: you’ve run production services, handled on-call responsibilities, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature.
Experience:Open sourceObservabilityDistributed systemsCloudAI/LLM-enabled software
Skills:Technical leadershipSystems thinkingSoftware craftsmanshipOperational mindsetCollaboration
Tech Stack:GoRustCC++TempoTraceQLOpenTelemetryKubernetesParquetSQLGrafanaPrometheusLoki

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