Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope | UK | Remote New United Kingdom (Remote)

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organisations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimise their telemetry to reduce noise and cost.

We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.

This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Ireland only.

The Opportunity

We build Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. Pyroscope gives engineers code-level visibility into how their applications use CPU and memory, down to the specific line of code, and connects that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack. Over the next year, you will help us:

• Ship Adaptive Profiles as the default ingestion strategy, so customers automatically collect the profiles they need at a cost that makes sense.
• Turn Pyroscope into a platform capability inside Grafana: bi-directional trace-to-profile correlation, integration with Kubernetes Monitoring and App Observability, and profiles surfaced where engineers already start their investigations.
• Prepare Pyroscope for an agent-driven world: APIs, CLI, and docs designed so AI agents can drive profiling end to end, covering the full performance optimisation lifecycle from finding an issue to verifying the fix.
• Push operational excellence and TCO further: generalised autoscaling, better UX for long queries, and BYOC automation that brings up a new cell with zero manual intervention.
• Double adoption by making profiling easy to start with: guided onboarding, use-case-driven docs, and assisted instrumentation so users get value in minutes instead of days.

What You'll Be Doing

As a Senior Engineer on Pyroscope, you will own meaningful projects end to end and help shape what the team builds next.

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, e.g. Read path efficiency improvement, or trace-to-profile correlation, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Wear the product hat. We have no dedicated PM: engineers on this team join customer calls, translate pain points into manageable deliverables, and directly shape the roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter.
• Partner across Grafana. Work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and the other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work.
• Support your teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, and treat incident response and post-incident learning as part of the craft.
• Contribute to open source. Pyroscope is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow, backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, always paired with strong code review and quality standards.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Solid experience with a systems language. We write Pyroscope in Go; experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc).
• Distributed systems in production. You have built and operated cloud services and understand what it takes to keep a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable.
• Product sense. You are comfortable talking to customers, sitting with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables.
• Curiosity and courage. We need someone who asks hard questions and challenges the status quo when appropriate.
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimise versus when to ship.
• Operational mindset. You have carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code, and treat reliability as a feature.
• Pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyse, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate.
• Clear communication. You work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tooling.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar in a previous role.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

How we work

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. In the UK, the compensation range for this role is £91,755 - £110,106. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law.