Backend Engineer, Sr. - Databases - Remote Work

About the Company

Grafana Labs develops Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform used by more than 10,000 organizations to monitor systems, investigate incidents, and manage telemetry data. Built on open-source technologies and open standards, its platform helps teams connect metrics, logs, traces, and profiles across their technology stacks. Grafana Labs operates as a fully remote company with a globally distributed team and a strong commitment to open-source development.

About the Role

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to work on Tempo, its open-source distributed tracing backend that powers Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. In this role, you will lead complex engineering initiatives, improve distributed data systems, and help evolve Tempo into a scalable platform for observability products and AI-driven workflows.

You will contribute across ingestion, storage, query execution, and metrics generation while balancing performance, reliability, cost, and maintainability. This is a remote position open to candidates in the United States and Canada.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead significant, multi-month engineering projects from initial problem definition and system design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operation.
• Own and improve key components of Tempo, including data ingestion, storage systems, query execution, and metrics generation.
• Write technical design documents, participate in design reviews, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and communicate engineering decisions clearly.
• Develop structured, predictable, and discoverable APIs that support Grafana products, AI assistants, external integrations, and automated workflows.
• Improve system reliability and operational performance by addressing service-level objectives, reducing recurring incidents, automating operational tasks, and improving deployment processes.
• Enhance autoscaling, customer limits, and multi-cell infrastructure to support growing workloads and reliable operations at scale.
• Optimize query performance, reduce latency, and support efficient querying across longer time ranges and large volumes of tracing data.
• Collaborate with product managers and related engineering teams to understand customer needs and deliver capabilities that support observability products.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, design feedback, and collaborative problem-solving.
• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews for the services you help build and maintain.
• Contribute to the open-source Tempo project by reviewing community contributions and participating in development discussions.
• Use AI-assisted development tools where appropriate to support prototyping, testing, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-up while maintaining strong engineering standards.

Required Qualifications

• Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution systems.
• A track record of leading complex technical projects from design and implementation through deployment and production operations.
• Strong software engineering skills, including the ability to write maintainable, reliable, and performant code.
• Strong experience with Go or substantial experience in systems programming languages such as Rust, C, or C++, with the ability to develop expertise in Go.
• Experience owning production services, participating in on-call rotations, improving reliability, and reducing operational overhead.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs involving performance, infrastructure costs, system complexity, and delivery timelines.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience producing technical documentation and collaborating through design reviews.
• Ability to work independently and effectively with a globally distributed team in a remote, asynchronous environment.
• A practical, customer-focused approach to problem-solving, including delivering incremental improvements and refining solutions based on feedback.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability platforms.
• Experience designing query languages, SQL-like query engines, TraceQL, or APIs consumed by services and automated agents.
• Familiarity with columnar storage formats such as Parquet or specialized storage formats for analytical workloads.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure, multi-cell architectures, or Kubernetes-based systems at scale.
• Experience building structured APIs, metadata discovery endpoints, deterministic interfaces, or evaluation tools for AI and large language model applications.
• Contributions to open-source projects or experience maintaining community-driven software.
• Experience using Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in production or personal projects.
• Experience working with fully remote, globally distributed engineering teams.

Salary & Benefits

The US compensation range for this role is $154,445–$185,334, listed as on-target earnings/base compensation. Actual compensation depends on the candidate’s experience, skills, and assessed level. Candidates applying from other locations will discuss the applicable local compensation range and benefits with their recruiter.

Benefits and workplace offerings include:

• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), providing team members with ownership in Grafana Labs.
• A fully remote work environment with a globally distributed team.
• A global annual leave policy of 30 days, including three designated Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
• Career development opportunities within a growing organization.
• Autonomy, transparent communication, and opportunities to contribute to open-source projects.
• Company-funded access to AI coding assistants, subject to security guidelines.
• In-person onboarding to help new team members learn about the company, its products, and its working practices.

Equal Opportunity

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer. The company welcomes applicants regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital or family status, carer status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Grafana Labs may use AI tools to assist with matching information in CVs to job requirements. The recruitment team manually reviews applications to assess candidates’ alignment with available opportunities.