Staff Backend Engineer, Tempo at Grafana Labs (Canada)

Confirmed open

Lead design and operation of Grafana Tempo, the distributed tracing backend, across ingestion, storage, querying, TraceQL metrics and scalable cloud operations. This posting lists Canada as its remote location.

Grafana Labs

Location: Canada (Remote)
Work arrangement: remote
Technologies: C++, Kubernetes, SQL, Go

Role overview

The Tempo team builds the open-source tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. This staff engineer sets direction for major system changes as Tempo scales to more cloud cells and supports higher-volume, higher-cardinality and agent-driven workloads. The role is remote for candidates in the United States or Canada.

Responsibilities

Lead multi-quarter initiatives for tracing APIs, autoscaling, limits, query performance and trace aggregation.
Own architecture decisions across ingestion, storage, query and metrics generation, balancing speed, cost and complexity.
Design structured APIs usable by people, downstream products and AI-assisted clients.
Improve service-level outcomes, automate rollouts, reduce operational toil and participate in on-call and incident reviews.
Mentor engineers, collaborate with product teams and review open-source community contributions.

Qualifications

Technical leadership of complex distributed systems through design, delivery and operation.
Hands-on work with production ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query systems or comparable data platforms.
Strong Go skills or deep experience in another systems language such as Rust, C or C++.
Experience operating services on call, using SLOs and reducing production toil.
Clear written communication and collaborative design; tracing, OpenTelemetry, query engines or columnar formats are useful additional experience.

Benefits

Grafana Labs describes remote work, stock units, in-person onboarding and a 30-day annual leave policy, subject to local law. Compensation ranges and additional benefits are country specific and appear on each employer posting.

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs develops Grafana Cloud and open-source observability tools for metrics, logs, traces and profiles. The company describes itself as remote first.