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Salary: USD 154,445 - 185,334 / annual
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Tempo team, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Tempo is at an inflection point in 2026, shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence while evolving into a platform that powers next-generation observability products including App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants.
In this role, you will own technical direction on the hardest problems in the roadmap and raise the bar across the team. You will deliver significant multi-month technical projects from problem framing through rollout—such as trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells, customer limits, and query engine improvements. You'll own major components of Tempo spanning ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation, writing design docs, participating in design reviews, and making sound trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
Key responsibilities include:
- Delivering significant technical projects that span design, delivery, and operations
- Owning major components of Tempo's architecture and contributing to ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation
- Building APIs for both humans and AI agents, shaping next-generation interfaces that are structured, deterministic, and discoverable
- Contributing to operational excellence by owning outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB)
- Collaborating with Product and sibling teams (App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, Grafana Assistant) to understand consumption patterns and ship unblocking features
- Mentoring and supporting engineers through thorough code review, constructive design feedback, and pairing
- Participating in on-call rotations for services you help build and contributing to incident response
- Engaging the open-source community, reviewing external contributions, and contributing to the project in the open
Example projects landing in 2026 include: trace aggregation and higher-density APIs with LLM-friendly response types; end-to-end autoscaling with customer limits and Tempo cells; agent-scale ingestion and query with guardrails for bursty, high-cardinality workloads; query performance improvements including new data formats and 30-day query ranges; parameterized rollouts and multi-cell operations; and customer-facing limits and self-service configuration.
The company invests 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 company-funded usage budgets. You'll have access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Customers include Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Technical ownership: track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects spanning design, delivery, and operations; demonstrated ability to help teammates grow
- Solid systems experience: significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar)
- Strong software craftsmanship: write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain; know when to optimize vs. when to ship
- Strong Go experience, or a clear path to it; solid experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
- Operational mindset: owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, treated SLOs as a product feature
- Customer focus and pragmatism: break complex problems into short feedback loops (analyze, design, deliver MVP, learn, iterate)
- Collaboration and clear writing: contribute through design docs, reviews, and shipped code; communicate clearly in fully remote, asynchronous environment
BONUS QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems
- Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs for programmatic consumption (by services or agents)
- Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads
- Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes
- Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses
- Open-source contribution or maintainership; comfort engaging a community in the open
- Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role or homelab
- Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team
