Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

United States (Remote) · Remote · full time · Lead / Staff / Principal

$174,986 – $209,983

Listed on Grafana Labs’s own careers site. You apply with them directly — we never stand between you and the employer.

What this role is

Grafana Labs seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to lead technical direction on Tempo, their distributed tracing database, tackling multi-quarter initiatives from architecture design through production operations. This role suits experienced systems engineers who thrive owning complex distributed data systems, mentoring teams, and shipping features that unblock downstream products and AI-driven workflows.

Our summary, not Grafana Labs’s wording. The full posting is on their site.

Skills this role names

What they ask for

Required

Multi-quarter technical initiative leadership spanning design, delivery, and operations
Hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production
Clean, robust, performant software engineering with strong code craftsmanship
Go experience or substantial systems language experience (Rust, C, C++)
Production service ownership with pager responsibilities and SLO focus
Asynchronous communication and design-driven leadership in remote settings

Nice to have

Tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems experience
Query language design or programmatic API design for service/agent consumers
Columnar storage (Parquet) or analytical workload-specific storage formats
Multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes
Building AI/LLM-facing systems with structured APIs and deterministic outputs
Open-source contribution or maintainership
On-call experience with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo
Fully remote globally distributed team experience