Responsibilities
- Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, including 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 Grafana products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators.
- Drive operational excellence against SLOs such as P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost per ingested gigabyte.
- Improve performance for high-volume ingestion, high-cardinality workloads, and long query ranges.
- Develop autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, multi-cell operations, customer limits, and self-service observability.
- Partner with Product and sibling 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 owned services.
- Contribute to Tempo’s open-source project, review external contributions, and engage with the community.
Requirements
- Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, 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 the ability to write clean, robust, performant, maintainable software.
- Strong Go experience or a path to Go; deep experience with Rust, C, or C++ is considered transferable.
- Experience owning production services, carrying a pager, reducing operational toil, and using SLOs to guide service quality.
- Ability to lead through design documents, reviews, collaboration, and shipped code in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
- Customer-focused, pragmatic approach using short feedback loops and iterative delivery.
- Bonus: experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
- Bonus: experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or programmatically consumed APIs.
- Bonus: experience with Parquet or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.
- Bonus: experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes.
- Bonus: experience building structured APIs, metadata or discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, or evaluation harnesses for AI/LLM consumers.
- Bonus: open-source contribution or maintainership experience.
- Bonus: experience using Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo on call.
- Bonus: experience in fully remote, globally distributed teams.
Benefits
- 100% remote work for applicants in Spain, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, or Germany.
- In-person onboarding.
- 30 days of annual leave per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
- Equity and bonus may be available.
- Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants.
- Career growth pathways and a globally distributed, asynchronous work 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.