Senior Backend Engineer – Databases

Grafana Labs

. Own technical direction on difficult Tempo roadmap problems .

Posted 10/14/2026full-timeRemote • United States, CanadaSenior💰 $154,445 - $185,334 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building and operating distributed data systems, with a strong focus on delivering complex technical initiatives and maintaining high service levels. Proficient in Go programming and capable of mentoring engineers while collaborating effectively in a remote environment.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Distributed Data SystemsGo ProgrammingIngestion PipelinesSLO ManagementTechnical Direction

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Software CraftsmanshipClean CodeRobust SoftwarePerformant SoftwareMaintainable SoftwareDesign Document WritingAPI DevelopmentIncident ResponsePost-Incident LearningAutomated Operations

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationCustomer FocusMentoring

Tools & Technologies

TempoGrafanaObservability ToolsStorage EnginesQuery Execution

Industry Keywords

Technical InitiativesMulti-Month ProjectsOperational ToilAsynchronous EnvironmentRemote Collaboration

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

GrafanaRustC++Go

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own technical direction on difficult Tempo roadmap problems
Deliver multi-month technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout
Partner with Staff engineers and the tech lead on broader cross-team direction
Own components across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation
Write and present design documents and participate in design reviews
Make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity
Build structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for humans, agents, products, and integrators
Own outcomes against SLOs such as P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost per ingested GB
Automate operations through parameterized rollouts and actionable alerts
Collaborate with Product and sibling teams including App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant
Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing
Participate in on-call, incident response, and post-incident learning
Engage the open-source community, review external contributions, and contribute to Tempo
Improve trace aggregation, autoscaling, ingestion and query performance, multi-cell operations, and customer-facing limits

Requirements

What you’ll need

Track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects spanning design, delivery, and operations
Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production
Experience with ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar systems
Strong software craftsmanship: clean, robust, performant, maintainable software
Strong Go experience, or experience with Rust, C, or C++ as a path to Go
Experience owning production services and carrying a pager
Experience reducing operational toil and treating SLOs as a product feature
Customer focus and pragmatic iterative delivery
Clear writing and communication in a fully remote, asynchronous environment
Candidates must be based in the US or Canada

Benefits

Comp & perks

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants
Access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
100% remote work and global remote culture
Career growth pathways
In-person onboarding
30 days of annual leave per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days
Transparent communication and regular company-wide updates
Autonomy and support to ship great work
Empowered, high-trust, low-ego culture
Global annual leave policy, subject to local legislation