Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope | UK | 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, 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.

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.
• Turn Pyroscope into a platform capability inside Grafana.
• Prepare Pyroscope for an agent-driven world.
• Push operational excellence and TCO further.
• Double adoption by making profiling easy to start with.

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.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database.
• Drive operational excellence.
• Partner across Grafana.
• Support your teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you 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.

Example problems you could work on:

• Adaptive Profiles: sampling and aggregation strategies.
• Large queries: query fairness, async execution, and autoscaling.
• Traces and profiles together: bi-directional correlation.
• Agent-ready Pyroscope: structured, deterministic APIs and a CLI.
• BYOC and regions: cell lifecycle automation.
• OTel-native profiling: evolve ingestion, storage, and query.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Solid experience with a systems language.
• Distributed systems in production.
• Product sense.
• Curiosity and courage.
• Strong software craftsmanship.
• Operational mindset.
• Pragmatism.
• Clear communication.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar.
• 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 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.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture.
• Scaling Organization.
• Transparent Communication.
• Innovation-Driven.
• Open Source Roots.
• Empowered Teams.
• Career Growth Pathways.
• Approachable Leadership.
• Passionate People.
• In-Person onboarding.
• Balance is Key.

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.