Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

Grafana Labs · R&D : Databases

Location: United States (Remote)
Workplace: Remote
Level: Staff+
Type: Unspecified
Pay: $175K–$210K/yr (estimated from posting text)
Posted: 6 months ago
Source: Greenhouse

What the posting covers

About the company

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and…

The Opportunity

We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across…

What You’ll Be Doing

As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team. Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless…

What You’ll Be Doing

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…

Example problems you could work on

These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026. Any one of them is a Staff-sized problem: 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…

What Makes You a Great Fit

Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and made the teams around you better. Deep systems experience. Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed…

Bonus Points For

Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems. Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents). Experience with columnar storage formats…

How we work

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical…

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.…

Excerpts only. The employer’s page has the complete posting.