Job description

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs powers the open observability cloud, building on open source, standards, and culture. Our managed platform Grafana Cloud helps over 7,000 customers and 35 million users monitor and improve their systems, including major organizations like NVIDIA and Microsoft. We operate fully remotely with a diverse global team of 1,600+ people.

Position Overview

We are scaling the Tempo backend for distributed tracing, shifting from foundational upgrades to product and operational excellence, transforming Tempo into a platform to support next-gen observability products and AI-driven tools.

Key Responsibilities

Ensure seamless user experiences by removing issues and limits in Grafana Cloud Traces.
Drive operational scalability as we expand infrastructure cells with autoscaling, rollouts, and toil reduction.
Evolve Tempo as a platform with advanced APIs, trace aggregation, and AI/LLM-friendly interfaces.
Optimize query speed for high throughput and extensive query ranges.
Prepare Tempo for high-volume, bursty workloads and AI-enabled analysis workflows.
Lead major technical projects from inception through delivery, including architecture ownership of core components.
Design usable APIs for developers and AI agents facilitating downstream product development.
Maintain high operational standards via monitoring, automation, and actionable alerts.
Collaborate closely with product and adjacent teams to ensure product success.
Mentor engineering team members through code reviews, design guidance, and knowledge sharing.
Participate actively in on-call rotations and incident management.
Engage with the open-source community by managing contributions and guiding the project's direction.

Desired Qualifications

Proven leadership in complex, long-term technical initiatives enhancing team capability.
Extensive practical experience in building and operating distributed data services such as ingestion pipelines and query engines.
Strong software engineering skills focusing on clean, maintainable, performant code with judicious optimization.
Proficiency in Go programming language or strong experience in similar languages like Rust, C, or C++.
A strong operational focus, experienced in production service ownership, reliability, and toil reduction.
Pragmatic problem-solving approach centered on delivering minimal viable products and iterative improvements.
Excellent remote communication skills through documentation and asynchronous collaboration.

Preferred Extras

Prior exposure to tracing technologies, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
Experience developing query languages or APIs designed for programmatic use.
Knowledge of columnar storage or analytical disk formats like Parquet.
Managing large-scale SaaS infrastructures on Kubernetes in multi-tenant, multi-cell environments.
Designing APIs and infrastructure for AI/LLM integration, including structured and deterministic outputs.
Contributions to open-source projects with community engagement.
Hands-on experience with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in any capacity.
Experience working fully remotely in distributed global teams.

Company Culture and Benefits

Fully remote and global team culture emphasizing collaboration and innovation.
Rapid growth environment with opportunities for meaningful impact.
Transparent communication and decision-making.
Autonomy supported by strong leadership and open-source values.
Focus on empowerment, career development, and thoughtful leadership presence.
Comprehensive onboarding with in-person opportunities to connect with peers.
Annual leave of 30 days including dedicated shutdown days to encourage work-life balance.
Equal opportunity employer fully supporting diversity and inclusion principles.

Compensation

In Ireland, the salary range is from EUR 117,600 to EUR 141,120 per year, varying by experience and assessed skills. Other countries have market-specific compensation discussed during recruitment.

Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo