Staff Backend Engineer – Databases

🕒 April 27

🇺🇸 United States – Remote

💵 $175k - $210k / year

⏰ Full Time

🔴 Lead

🔙 Backend Engineer

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Grafana Labs

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

501 - 1000 employees

Founded 2014

🏢 Enterprise

☁️ SaaS

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Enterprise • SaaS • Artificial Intelligence

Grafana Labs is a company that specializes in open-source observability technologies and solutions. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for logging, metrics, tracing, and profile management with products like Grafana, Loki, Tempo, and Mimir. Their offerings are designed to help businesses visualize, monitor, and alert on data from various sources, providing capabilities such as anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and service level objective management using AI/ML insights. Grafana Labs provides both cloud-based and self-managed solutions, ideal for infrastructure, application, and frontend observability. Additionally, their platform supports integration with various data sources like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, making them a key player in the observability and infrastructure monitoring space.

📋 Description

• 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 (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably. • Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts. • Partner with Product and sibling teams. Work closely with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them. • Mentor engineers. Raise the engineering bar 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. Tempo is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.

🎯 Requirements

• 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. • 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. • Operational mindset. You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore. • 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.

🏖️ Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture • Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. • Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. • Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. • Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. • Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. • Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. • Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. • Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. • In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. • Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.