Responsibilities
- Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives such as trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells, customer limits, and query engine improvements.
- Own the architecture of Tempo’s ingestion, storage, query, and metrics-generation components.
- Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for human users, agents, downstream products, and external integrators.
- Drive operational excellence through SLO ownership, automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and toil reduction.
- Improve query latency, ingestion performance, scalability, and support for larger and higher-cardinality workloads.
- Partner with Product and adjacent teams including App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, design feedback, pairing, and technical writing.
- Participate in on-call, incident response, and post-incident learning for supported services.
- Contribute to the Tempo open-source community, including reviewing external contributions and steering the project publicly.
Requirements
- Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives from design through delivery and operations.
- Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution systems.
- Strong software craftsmanship and experience writing clean, robust, performant, maintainable software.
- Strong Go experience or a path to Go; deep Rust, C, or C++ experience is also relevant.
- Experience owning production services, participating in on-call, reducing toil, and using SLOs to drive operational outcomes.
- Ability to lead through design documents, reviews, collaboration, and shipped code in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
- Customer-focused, pragmatic approach with short feedback loops and iterative delivery.
- Bonus: experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, observability systems, query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, programmatic APIs, Parquet or other columnar storage formats, Kubernetes, multi-tenant SaaS, AI/LLM consumers, open source, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
Benefits
- 100% remote role, with applicants considered in Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and Ireland.
- In-person onboarding is provided.
- 30 days of annual leave per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
- Equity, bonus if applicable, and other company benefits are included.
- Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants and access to frontier models.
- Career growth pathways, transparent communication, and an open-source, globally distributed culture.
About Grafana
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, while getting the visibility they need to run AI systems reliably and at scale. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – 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 1,400+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.