Staff Software Engineer (Databases, Tempo)

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Software Engineer, where you'll lead the development of Tempo, an open-source distributed tracing backend. You'll set technical direction, own the architecture of core Tempo components, drive operational excellence, and mentor engineers. You'll also have the opportunity to contribute to open source and engage with the community. Enjoy a fully remote work environment, generous vacation and healthcare benefits, and a focus on professional development.

• Contribuer à l'évolution de Tempo en tant que plateforme, en développant des API de haute densité, l'agrégation des traces et les métriques TraceQL.
• Diriger des initiatives techniques complexes, de la conception à la mise en œuvre, en améliorant les performances et l'évolutivité de Tempo.
• Collaborer avec les équipes produit et les équipes connexes pour comprendre comment Tempo est utilisé et livrer ce qui les débloque.
• Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and made the teams around you better
• Deep systems experience. Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar
• Customer focus and pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate
• Leadership through writing and collaboration. You lead through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, not hierarchy. You communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment
• Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship
• Strong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well
• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems
• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents)
• Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., 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: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses
• Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a homelab)
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team