[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer @Grafana Labs

Role Description

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 the Grafana stack.

2026 is an inflection point for Tempo. After a major architectural upgrade and the launch of TraceQL metrics, we are shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence, and evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products.

Over the next year, you will help us:

• Make Grafana Cloud Traces “just work” for customers by eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes.
• Achieve operational excellence at scale as we grow from close to 50 cells today into triple digits this year.
• Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler: higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics math, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces.
• Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges.
• Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows.

Qualifications

• Technical ownership with a track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects.
• Solid systems experience in building and operating distributed data systems.
• Strong software craftsmanship with clean, robust, performant software.
• Strong Go experience or a path to it.
• Operational mindset with experience owning production services.
• Customer focus and pragmatism in breaking complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Collaboration and clear writing skills in a remote, asynchronous environment.

Requirements

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages or APIs intended for programmatic consumption.
• Experience with columnar storage formats 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 with structured APIs and deterministic outputs.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture.
• Scaling Organization with meaningful work in a high-growth environment.
• Transparent Communication with open decision-making.
• Innovation-Driven with autonomy and support to ship great work.
• Open Source Roots built on community-driven values.
• Empowered Teams with a high trust, low ego culture.
• Career Growth Pathways with defined opportunities.
• Approachable Leadership with transparent execs.
• Passionate People who care deeply about their work.
• In-Person onboarding for new team members.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.