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Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to work on Pyroscope, an open-source continuous profiling database that provides code-level visibility into CPU and memory usage. The role is fully remote, restricted to candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Ireland.
Pyroscope is at an inflection point: the team completed a V2 architecture rollout that cut production costs by 92% while improving scalability, and grew the customer base by 64% last year. The focus is now shifting from standalone feature development to reducing friction across the full experience—better onboarding, deeper integration with the Grafana stack, and profiles optimized for operational and SRE workflows.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own meaningful projects end-to-end, from concept through rollout, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up (e.g., read path efficiency, trace-to-profile correlation).
- Design, build, and operate core distributed database components: ingestion, storage, and query engines, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
- Participate in product decisions directly—join customer calls, translate pain points into deliverables, and shape the roadmap (the team has no dedicated PM).
- Drive operational excellence by owning SLO and unit cost targets, automating toil, and improving on-call experience.
- Collaborate across Grafana teams (App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, other database squads) to integrate profiles into engineers' existing workflows.
- Support teammates through design reviews, code review, and pairing in a fully remote environment.
- Participate in EMEA on-call rotation and treat incident response as part of the craft.
Key initiatives for the next year include shipping Adaptive Profiles as the default ingestion strategy, turning Pyroscope into a platform capability inside Grafana with bi-directional trace-to-profile correlation, preparing APIs and CLIs for AI agent-driven profiling, pushing operational excellence further, and doubling adoption through guided onboarding and assisted instrumentation.
