Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | Sweden | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer to lead the development of Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team. This is a remote opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will: - Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements. - Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team. - Design APIs for humans and agents. Shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably. - Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts. - Partner with Product and sibling teams. Work closely with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them. - Mentor engineers. Raise 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. Tempo is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open. WHAT YOU'LL NEED - Strong technical expertise in distributed tracing, databases, and cloud infrastructure. - Experience leading technical initiatives and owning architecture. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills. - Ability to drive design reviews, make trade-offs, and document technical decisions. - Strong mentorship and leadership skills. - Experience with open-source development and community engagement. WHY REMOTE We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. We are committed to creating a flexible and inclusive work environment that allows our team members to thrive from anywhere in the world. BENEFITS - Competitive salary and benefits package. - Opportunity to work on a high-impact project with a global team. - Flexible work arrangements and remote work policy. - Professional development opportunities, including access to modern AI coding assistants and a company-funded usage budget. - Collaborative and inclusive work environment. - Opportunity to contribute to open-source development and community engagement.