Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Tempo team, responsible for developing and maintaining the distributed tracing backend that powers Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. This fully remote position is open to candidates in the United States and Canada. As a Senior Engineer on Tempo, you will own technical direction on the most challenging problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team.
In this role, you will deliver significant technical projects, taking well-scoped, multi-month initiatives from problem framing through rollout, such as trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells, customer limits, or query engine improvements. You will own major components of Tempo, contributing to and owning parts of ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Additionally, you will build structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for products, assistants, and external integrators, and contribute to operational excellence by owning outcomes for the areas you build against concrete SLOs.
The ideal candidate will have a demonstrated track record delivering complex, multi-month projects spanning design, delivery, and operations. Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution systems, is essential. Strong Go experience, or experience in systems languages such as Rust, C, or C++, is required. The candidate should also have experience owning production services, carrying a pager, reducing toil, and treating SLOs as a product feature.
Compensation for this role includes a base salary ranging from $154,445 to $185,334 USD annually, along with Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Grafana Labs offers a remote-first, globally distributed team environment that values autonomy, transparency, and open-source collaboration. Employees enjoy benefits such as 30 days of annual leave per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days, and a company-funded budget for AI coding assistant usage.
Joining Grafana Labs provides an opportunity to work on cutting-edge observability tools within a company that is scaling rapidly while maintaining its open-source legacy and global collaborative culture. The team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything they do. This role offers the chance to contribute to the evolution of Tempo into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products.