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Grafana LabsSenior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for its Tempo team. The employer provides a managed observability platform utilized by over 10,000 organizations, including major…
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About This Role
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for its Tempo team. The employer provides a managed observability platform utilized by over 10,000 organizations, including major entities like Microsoft, Bloomberg, and Salesforce. This position focuses on the open-source distributed tracing backend, Tempo, which facilitates trace searching, metric generation from spans, and data connection across the Grafana ecosystem. This role suits engineers experienced in building and running distributed data systems who…
Job Description
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for its Tempo team. The employer provides a managed observability platform utilized by over 10,000 organizations, including major entities like Microsoft, Bloomberg, and Salesforce. This position focuses on the open-source distributed tracing backend, Tempo, which facilitates trace searching, metric generation from spans, and data connection across the Grafana ecosystem.
This role suits engineers experienced in building and running distributed data systems who want to direct technical initiatives, craft human- and agent-friendly APIs, and improve query performance and autoscaling capabilities. The position involves guiding multi-month projects, addressing operational excellence goals, collaborating with product groups, supporting peer development through code reviews, and engaging with the open-source community.
Grafana Labs operates as a distributed organization with a culture centered on trust, autonomy, and transparency. Team members leverage modern AI coding tools within a supportive environment. The role requires handling on-call duties for services built by the team. Candidates will participate in an initial in-person onboarding process designed to help new hires integrate with fellow team members.
Responsibilities
- Own technical direction and deliver significant multi-month technical projects from problem framing to rollout
- Contribute to and manage components of ingestion, storage, query execution, and metrics generation
- Write and present design documentation while making sound trade-offs regarding performance, cost, and complexity
- Build structured, deterministic, and discoverable APIs for humans and AI agents
- Maintain operational excellence and meet SLOs for P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and TCO per ingested gigabyte
- Collaborate with product managers and sibling teams to ship features that unblock dependent products
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, constructive design feedback, and pair programming
- Participate in on-call rotations for built services and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning
- Engage the open-source community by reviewing external contributions and participating in the project openly
Requirements
- Track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects spanning design, delivery, and operations
- Hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production environments
- Ability to write clean, robust, and performant software
- Proficiency in Go, or solid experience in other systems programming languages such as Rust, C, or C++
- Operational background maintaining production services, managing pagers, reducing toil, and treating SLOs as product features
- Clear communication skills suited for a fully remote and asynchronous working environment
Qualifications
- Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems
- Background in designing query languages, SQL or TraceQL-like engines, or programmatically consumed APIs
- Experience working with columnar storage formats like Parquet or purpose-built analytical on-disk formats
- Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes at scale
- Experience building structured APIs, metadata or discovery endpoints, and deterministic outputs for AI or LLM consumers
- Prior open-source contribution or maintainership experience
- Familiarity as an on-user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo
Core Skills
Benefits
- Restricted Stock Units providing ownership in the company
- Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, which includes 3 reserved Grafana Shutdown Days
- Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
What is the location and remote policy for this role?
This position is fully remote, and the posting seeks candidates located in the United States and Canada.
What is the salary range for this position?
For candidates in Canada, the base compensation range is CAD 164,490 to 197,389 per year, with actual pay varying based on level, experience, and skillset.
What employment type is this job?
The posting specifies full-time employment.
What programming language is primarily used for Tempo?
Tempo is written in Go, and solid experience in Go or other systems languages like Rust, C, or C++ is required.
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