Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Engineer to join our Tempo team at Grafana Labs. As a Staff Engineer, you will play a critical role in shaping the technical direction of our distributed tracing backend and driving the development of our next-generation observability products. You will be responsible for leading multi-quarter technical initiatives, owning the architecture of core Tempo components, and designing APIs for humans and agents. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will: - Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, driving innovation and improvement across the team. - Own the architecture of core Tempo components, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and documenting the "why" for the team. - Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping the next generation of Tempo's interfaces to enable seamless integration with Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators. - Drive operational excellence, owning outcomes against concrete SLOs and pushing the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts. - Partner with Product and sibling teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them. - Mentor engineers, raising the engineering bar through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing that leaves the team smarter than you found it. - Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning. - Contribute to open source, engaging the community, reviewing external contributions, and helping steer the project in the open. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong background in distributed systems and observability. - Proven track record of leading technical initiatives and driving innovation in a fast-paced environment. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams. - Strong understanding of cloud-native technologies, including containerization, service meshes, and cloud storage. - Experience with modern AI coding assistants and pragmatic AI-assisted development. WHY REMOTE Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. As a remote team member, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere and enjoy a better work-life balance. BENEFITS - Competitive salary and stock options. - Comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, and vision insurance. - 401(k) matching program. - Flexible PTO policy. - Access to modern AI coding assistants and a company-funded usage budget. - Opportunities for professional growth and development in a fast-paced and innovative environment.