Staff Backend Engineer, Tempo at Grafana Labs (United States)

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

Grafana Labs

Location: Remote
Advertised region: United States (Remote)
Work arrangement: remote
Technologies: C++, Kubernetes, SQL, Go

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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.

Technology in this role

C++: Strong Go skills or deep experience in another systems language such as Rust, C or .
Kubernetes: • Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on .
SQL: • Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or .
Go: Strong Go skills or deep experience in another systems language such as Rust, C or .
C: Strong Go skills or deep experience in another systems language such as Rust, C or .
Rust: Strong Go skills or deep experience in another systems language such as Rust, C or .
LLM: • Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler: higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics math, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces that downstream products and agents can build .
CAN: Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, .
Salesforce: Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana .
Prometheus: • Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a .
Grafana: The Tempo team builds the open-source tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise .

Role-specific candidate guide

Preparation notes based on the employer’s stated responsibilities and qualifications.

Understanding the scope. This Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote position at Grafana Labs is best assessed through the work described in the employer’s posting, rather than the title alone. The available role overview says: “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…” Read that statement together with the responsibilities below to understand the likely balance between delivery, coordination and technical decision-making. The role belongs to the software engineering area, but that label is only a guide to the work; the employer’s own requirements remain decisive. Before applying, check the original listing for reporting lines, product or team assignment, employment terms and any details that may have changed since this copy was checked. Where this page says a fact is not specified, treat it as an open question rather than an implied promise.

What the responsibilities signal. The posting specifically names “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.”. For each duty, identify a project where you performed comparable work and be ready to describe the context, your own contribution, constraints, decisions, and measurable result. Explain how you moved from the initial need to implementation, review, release or operational follow-through, where those stages apply. If the work involved other teams or users, distinguish your decisions from the group’s contribution. Avoid presenting a technology keyword as proof by itself: connect it to the problem you solved, the scale or complexity involved, and what changed after your work. The source may contain additional duties; review it directly before preparing your application.

How to read the requirements. The listed qualifications include “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++.”.

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.

Employer website

How to apply

Check the original posting to confirm the role is still open before applying.

Check employer posting

Source checked: 2026-10-09

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