About the role

Role overview

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Engineer to help shape the future of observability. You’ll work on Tempo, an open-source distributed tracing backend, evolving it into a platform powering Grafana’s next-generation observability products.

Key missions

Contribute to Tempo’s evolution as a platform by building high-density APIs, trace aggregation, and TraceQL-related capabilities.
Lead complex multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem definition through implementation and deployment.
Ensure operational excellence at scale by reducing manual work and automating processes.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction and own the architecture of core Tempo components.
Design APIs and drive their evolution for programmatic consumption.
Drive operational excellence across production systems.
Partner with product and sibling teams to deliver platform capabilities.
Mentor engineers through design docs, reviews, and collaboration.
Participate in on-call duties.
Contribute to open source.

Requirements

Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, high-performance code that others can maintain; know when to optimize vs. ship.
Operational mindset: owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and used SLOs as product features.
Leadership through writing and collaboration: lead with design docs, reviews, and shipped code; communicate clearly in fully remote async environments.
Strong Go (or a clear path to it). Tempo is written in Go.
Deep systems experience building and operating distributed data systems in production (e.g., ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution).
Track record of leading multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations.
Experience with tracing and/or OpenTelemetry, and large-scale observability systems.

Nice-to-haves

Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, and/or programmatic APIs.
Experience with columnar storage (e.g., Parquet) or custom on-disk analytical formats.
Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
Experience building for AI/LLM consumers (structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses).
Open-source contribution/maintainership and comfort engaging the community.
Familiarity as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
Experience working in fully remote, globally distributed teams.

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is a software company focused on observability and monitoring, building open-source products used to understand and troubleshoot complex systems. Its offerings include Tempo, a distributed tracing backend that supports and powers Grafana’s next-generation observability platform.

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