Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Tempo We're scaling fast at Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, and we're looking for a talented Staff Software Engineer to join our team. As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, own the architecture of core Tempo components, design APIs for humans and agents, drive operational excellence, partner with Product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, participate in on-call, and contribute to open source. Your responsibilities will include: - Eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes in Grafana Cloud Traces - Achieving operational excellence at scale as we grow from close to 50 cells today into triple digits this year - Evolving Tempo into a platform enabler with higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces - Pushing performance further with faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges - Preparing Tempo for an agent-driven world with larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads and new categories of AI-powered workflows WHAT YOU'LL NEED - Strong technical leadership skills with experience in leading multi-quarter technical initiatives - Ability to own the architecture of core Tempo components and drive design reviews - Experience designing APIs for humans and agents - Proven track record of driving operational excellence and owning outcomes against concrete SLOs - Strong collaboration and communication skills with experience partnering with Product and sibling teams - Ability to mentor engineers and contribute to open source WHY REMOTE We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. This role is open to applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany. BENEFITS - Competitive salary and benefits package - Opportunity to work on a high-impact project with a talented team - Investment in developer productivity with modern AI coding assistants and a company-funded usage budget - Encouragement of pragmatic AI-assisted development with strong code review and quality standards - Access to a global community of open-source contributors and a chance to contribute to the Tempo project