# Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo

**Company:** [Grafana Labs](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/grafana-labs)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Go, Rust, C, C++, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Traceql, Parquet, Distributed Systems, SaaS, API Design, Query Engines, Autoscaling, SLOs, Open Source
**Posted:** 2026-07-09

> Leads the architecture, performance, and operational excellence of Tempo, Grafana’s distributed tracing backend. The role requires substantial distributed-systems experience, strong systems programming ability, production ownership, and technical leadership across multi-quarter initiatives.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, including trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, and query engine improvements.
- Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
- Drive design reviews, make trade-offs across performance, cost, and complexity, and document architectural decisions.
- Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for humans, agents, downstream products, and external integrators.
- Drive operational excellence against SLOs such as P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost of ownership per ingested GB.
- Automate operations through parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and toil reduction.
- Partner with Product and sibling teams to understand how Tempo is consumed and unblock downstream products.
- Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing, and technical writing.
- Participate in on-call and incident response, including post-incident learning.
- Contribute to the open-source Tempo project and engage with its community.

## Requirements
- Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations.
- Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution systems.
- Strong software craftsmanship, including clean, robust, maintainable, and performant code.
- Strong Go experience, or substantial experience in Rust, C, or C++ with the ability to learn Go.
- Experience owning production services, participating in on-call, reducing toil, and operating against SLOs.
- Customer-focused, pragmatic approach with iterative delivery and short feedback loops.
- Clear communication through design documents, reviews, and shipped code in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
- Experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or programmatically consumed APIs.
- Experience with columnar storage formats such as Parquet 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, including structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, and evaluation harnesses.

## Compensation and benefits
- Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants.
- Access to frontier models, including GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3 Pro.

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