Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | Germany | Remote

Overview

Staff Software Engineer for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces.

What you'll do

• Eliminate rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes for Grafana Cloud Traces.
• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives across framing, delivery, and rollout.
• Own architecture for core Tempo components including ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Drive design reviews and make trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Own outcomes against SLOs and push toward Zero Ops via automation and actionable alerts.
• Participate in on-call and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning.

What you'll need

• Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery, and operations.
• Hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship with ability to write clean, robust, performant code.
• Strong Go experience (Tempo is written in Go) or a path to it.
• Operational mindset including owning production services, carrying a pager, and reducing toil.
• Leadership through design docs, reviews, and shipped code.

Details

• Remote role located in Germany (remote) and considered for applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany.