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 and make trade-offs across performance, cost, and complexity.
- Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for Grafana products, LLM-driven assistants, agents, and external integrators.
- Drive operational excellence through SLO ownership, automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and toil reduction.
- Improve query performance, ingestion scale, autoscaling, multi-cell operations, and customer self-service configuration.
- Partner with Product and sibling teams to deliver capabilities for App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, Grafana Assistant, and related products.
- Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing, and technical writing.
- Participate in on-call, incident response, post-incident learning, and open-source community contribution.
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 experience writing clean, robust, performant, maintainable software.
- Strong Go experience or deep experience with systems languages such as Rust, C, or C++.
- Experience owning production services, participating in on-call, reducing toil, and working with SLOs.
- Ability to lead through design documents, code reviews, collaboration, and shipped software in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
- Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems is a bonus.
- Experience with query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, programmatic APIs, columnar storage formats such as Parquet, Kubernetes, multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure, AI/LLM consumers, or open-source projects is a bonus.
Benefits
- 100% remote work for applicants located in Spain, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, or Germany.
- In-person onboarding is provided.
- 30 days of annual leave per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are included with the role.
- Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants and access to frontier models.
- Career growth pathways and a globally distributed, remote-first 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.