Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the development and architecture of Tempo, an open-source distributed tracing backend, as part of their observability platform. The role involves setting technical direction, driving multi-quarter initiatives, and collaborating across teams to enhance Tempo's capabilities and performance.

Location: Remote (US and Canada)

Salary: CAD 186,368 – CAD 223,642

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives such as trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling, and query engine improvements.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Design APIs for humans and agents to enable reliable building on Tempo.
• Drive operational excellence through automation, monitoring, and incident management.
• Partner with product and other teams to understand and improve Tempo's integration and usage.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Participate in on-call duties and incident response.
• Contribute to open source community efforts for Tempo.

Requirements

• Technical leadership experience in complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep experience building and operating distributed data systems, including ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution.
• Strong software craftsmanship with performance and maintainability in mind.
• Proficiency in Go or other systems languages like Rust, C, C++.
• Operational mindset with experience owning production services and reducing toil.
• Customer-focused, pragmatic problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication skills for remote collaboration and leadership.

Benefits

• Competitive salary (Canada: $186,368 - $223,642 CAD), RSUs, and a global remote-first culture.
• Opportunities for career growth and development.
• Access to AI coding assistants and modern development tools.
• Inclusive, transparent, and innovative work environment.

Additional Information

• Grafana Labs is committed to diversity and equal opportunity.
• The role involves working on high-impact projects that shape the future of observability and AI integration in Tempo.