Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo based in Canada. Join a remote-first engineering team building and scaling a distributed tracing platform that helps organizations understand application performance and troubleshoot complex systems. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will shape the technical direction of core backend components, from data ingestion and storage to query execution and metrics generation. You will lead significant engineering initiatives focused on reliability, scalability, operational excellence, and performance. Your work will help evolve the platform into a foundation for advanced observability products and AI-powered workflows. Collaborating with product managers and engineers across teams, you will deliver robust APIs and capabilities for both human users and automated agents. This role offers substantial technical ownership, opportunities to mentor other engineers, and the chance to contribute to an open-source project in a globally distributed environment. Accountabilities - Lead complex, multi-month engineering projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations. - Own and improve key backend components across data ingestion, storage, query processing, and metrics generation. - Develop and maintain scalable APIs that support observability products, external integrations, and AI-powered assistants, emphasizing structured, predictable, and discoverable interfaces. - Produce technical design documents, participate in architecture reviews, communicate engineering decisions, and balance performance, cost, maintainability, and complexity. - Improve production reliability and operational efficiency by defining and tracking service-level objectives (SLOs), reducing recurring incidents, automating operational tasks, and streamlining deployments.

- Optimize query performance, ingestion throughput, storage efficiency, and support for long-range queries and increasingly demanding workloads. - Help scale multi-tenant infrastructure through autoscaling, customer limits, safe rollouts, and operational tooling that supports growth without proportionally increasing maintenance overhead. - Partner with product managers and adjacent engineering teams to understand their needs and deliver platform capabilities that unblock downstream products and workflows. - Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design feedback, technical collaboration, and pairing. - Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews, using lessons learned to improve system reliability. - Contribute to open-source development by reviewing community contributions, sharing improvements, and engaging with the wider developer community. - Use AI-assisted development tools where appropriate to support prototyping, testing, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-up while maintaining high engineering and security standards. Requirements - Demonstrated experience delivering complex, multi-month software engineering projects, including technical design, implementation, deployment, and production support. - Strong hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution systems, or comparable infrastructure. - Strong software engineering fundamentals, with the ability to write clean, maintainable, reliable, and performant code. - Solid experience with Go, or substantial systems programming experience in languages such as Rust, C, or C++ and the ability to develop proficiency in Go. - Experience operating production services, participating in on-call rotations, troubleshooting incidents, improving service reliability, and reducing operational toil.