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 human users, agents, downstream products, and external integrators.
- Drive operational excellence through SLO ownership, automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and toil reduction.
- Improve query performance, ingestion scale, multi-cell operations, and support for bursty, high-cardinality workloads.
- Partner with Product, App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to deliver platform capabilities.
- Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing, and technical writing.
- Participate in on-call and incident response for services the team builds.
- Contribute to Tempo’s open-source community, including reviewing external contributions and helping steer the project.
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, including writing clean, robust, maintainable, and performant software.
- Strong Go experience or a path to Go proficiency; deep experience in Rust, C, or C++ is transferable.
- Experience owning production services, participating in on-call, reducing toil, and working with SLOs.
- Customer-focused, pragmatic approach using short feedback loops and iterative delivery.
- Clear written communication and collaboration skills for a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
- Bonus: experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, observability systems, query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, programmatic APIs, Parquet, analytical storage formats, Kubernetes, multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure, AI/LLM consumers, open-source projects, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
Benefits
- 100% remote work with applicants welcomed from Spain, Sweden, the UK, Ireland, and Germany.
- Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants and access to frontier models.
- Equity, bonus if applicable, and other location-specific benefits.
- 30 days of annual leave per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
- In-person onboarding.
- Career growth pathways and a remote-first, 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.