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

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. You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

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, such as assistant-driven triage and “why is this slow?”-style investigations.

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, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements.
• 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.
• Shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably.
• 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 to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing that leaves the team smarter than you found it.
• Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning.
• Contribute to open source. Engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Technical leadership with a track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience with substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship with clean, robust, performant software.
• Strong Go, or a path to it; deep experience in other systems languages translates well.
• Operational mindset with ownership of production services and treating SLOs as a product feature.
• Customer focus and pragmatism, breaking complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages 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, and comfort engaging a community in the open.

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.