Senior Backend Engineer (Databases Tempo)

As a Senior Engineer on Tempo, you will own technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team
Deliver significant technical projects. Take well-scoped, multi-month initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.G., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements. Partner with Staff engineers and the tech lead on broader, cross-team direction
Own major components of Tempo. Contribute to and own parts of ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Write and present design docs, participate in design reviews, make sound trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team
Build APIs for humans and agents. Help shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably
Contribute to operational excellence. Own outcomes for the areas you build against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB), and help move the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts
Collaborate with Product and sibling teams. Work with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them
Mentor and support engineers. Raise the bar through thorough code review, constructive design feedback, and pairing, especially with junior and mid-level engineers
Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning
Contribute to open source. Tempo is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and contribute to the project in the open
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026:
Trace aggregation and higher-density APIs: extend TraceQL metrics, design LLM-friendly response types, and make Tempo a first-class data source for Grafana’s AI assistant
Autoscaling end-to-end: customer limits and Tempo cells, with hysteresis, predictive scaling for spikes, and safe scale-down
Agent-scale ingestion and query: guardrails for bursty, high-cardinality, agent-generated workloads
Query performance: new data formats, smarter query pipelines, targeted optimizations for common Drilldown and Traces workflows, and 30-day query ranges
Rollouts and multi-cell operations: parameterized rollouts, push-button deploys, and the tooling to grow safely into triple-digit cell counts without a proportional increase in alert noise
Limits and self-service: drive customer-facing configuration and observability so escalations trend toward zero
Benefits
Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunityCustomer focus and pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterateStrong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to shipCollaboration and clear writing. You contribute through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, and you communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environmentTechnical ownership. A track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and of helping the teammates around you growOperational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a choreSolid systems experience. Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similarStrong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Solid experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates wellExperience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systemsExperience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents)Experience with columnar storage formats (e.G., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloadsExperience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on KubernetesExperience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnessesOpen-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the openExperience in a fully remote, globally distributed teamExperience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a homelab)
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