Remote Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote in Luton

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, organizations 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 trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. 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 opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland or Germany.

The Opportunity

We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack. Over the next year, you will help us:

• Make Grafana Cloud Traces “just work” for customers by eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes.
• Achieve operational excellence at scale as we grow from close to 50 cells today into triple digits this year, with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and aggressive toil reduction.
• Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler: higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics math, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces that downstream products and agents can build on.
• Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges to match competitors.
• Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows.

What You'll Be Doing:

• As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team.
• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team.
• Design APIs for humans and agents.
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and push the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams.
• Mentor engineers.
• Participate in on-call for the services you help build.
• Contribute to open source.

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.

Example problems you could work on:

• Trace aggregation and higher-density APIs.
• Autoscaling end to end.
• Agent-scale ingestion and query.
• Query performance.
• Rollouts and multi-cell operations.
• Limits and self-service.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Technical leadership.
• Deep systems experience.
• Strong software craftsmanship.
• Strong Go, or a path to it.
• Operational mindset.
• Customer focus and pragmatism.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically.
• Experience with columnar storage formats or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.

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.