[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo @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, 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, with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and aggressive toil reduction.
• 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 leadership with a track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience in building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship with clean, robust, performant software.
• Strong Go programming skills or a path to it.
• Operational mindset with experience owning production services.
• Customer focus and pragmatism in problem-solving.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration in a remote environment.

Requirements

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages or APIs for programmatic consumption.
• Experience with columnar storage formats or analytical workloads.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers.
• 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 environment with autonomy and support.
• Open Source Roots that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams with a high trust, low ego culture.
• Defined opportunities for career growth.
• Approachable Leadership with transparent execs.
• In-Person onboarding for new employees.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.

Company Description

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries.

We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work.