Staff Software Engineer Databases

• Deliver reliable Grafana Cloud Traces by removing rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failures.
• Achieve operational excellence at scale, expanding from ~50 to triple-digit cells with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and reduced toil.
• Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler with higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics, and LLM-friendly interfaces.
• Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and 30-day query ranges.
• Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world with larger, burstier workloads and new AI-powered workflows.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives such as trace aggregation APIs, limitless Tempo, autoscaling, and query engine improvements.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components-ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation-and drive design reviews.
• Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping the next generation of Tempo's interfaces.
• Drive operational excellence under concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB).
• Partner with Product and sibling teams to ship features that unblock them.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing, and documentation.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident response.
• Contribute to Tempo's open-source community by reviewing external contributions.

• Technical leadership with a track record of multi-quarter initiatives that span design, delivery, and ops.
• Deep systems experience building and operating production distributed data systems.
• Strong software craftsmanship; clean, robust, performant code with a focus on shipping.
• Proficiency in Go (or a path to it); Rust, C, or C++ experience is acceptable.
• Operational mindset: ownership of production services, pager duty, reduced toil, and SLO-driven product.
• Customer focus: breaking problems into short feedback loops and iterating fast.
• Leadership through collaboration, design docs, and clear communication in a fully remote environment., * Tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability expertise.
• Designing query languages or programmatic APIs.
• Experience with columnar storage formats (Parquet, etc.).
• Operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Building for AI/LLM consumers (structured APIs, metadata, deterministic outputs).
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role or homelab.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team., Remote-first; synchronous video meetings combined with asynchronous written collaboration. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and open communication.

Base compensation in Spain: €94,025 - €112,830. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Market-specific ranges will be discussed by recruiters.

Why You'll Thrive At Grafana Labs

• 100% remote, global culture.
• High-growth, innovative environment.
• Transparent communication and decision-making.
• Open-source values and community involvement.
• High trust, low ego culture focused on outcomes.
• Clear career growth pathways.
• Approachable leadership.
• Passionate, supportive team.
• Global annual leave: 30 days plus 3 days reserved for company shutdowns.