Senior Backend Engineer – Databases

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States, +1 more country.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the technical direction concerning challenging problems on the Tempo roadmap.

• Execute multi-month technical projects from the initial problem definition to final deployment.

• Collaborate with Staff engineers and the tech lead to establish broader cross-team strategies.

• Manage components related to ingestion, storage, querying, and metrics generation.

• Create and present design documentation and engage in design review processes.

• Assess trade-offs related to performance, cost, and complexity.

• Develop structured, deterministic, and discoverable APIs for users, agents, products, and integrators.

• Take responsibility for outcomes against Service Level Objectives (SLOs) such as P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost per ingested GB.

• Automate operational tasks through parameterized rollouts and actionable alerts.

• Work alongside Product and related teams, including App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant.

• Guide engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and collaborative programming.

• Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews.

• Engage with the open-source community, evaluate external contributions, and contribute to Tempo.

• Enhance trace aggregation, autoscaling, ingestion and query performance, multi-cell operations, and customer-facing limits.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven history of delivering complex, multi-month projects encompassing design, execution, and operations.

• Extensive hands-on experience in building and operating distributed data systems in a production environment.

• Familiarity with ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or related systems.

• Strong software craftsmanship: producing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.

• Proficient in Go, or possess experience in Rust, C, or C++ as a pathway to Go.

• Experience in managing production services and being on-call.

• Skill in minimizing operational toil and treating SLOs as a key product feature.

• Customer-oriented mindset with a focus on pragmatic iterative delivery.

• Ability to communicate clearly and effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous setting.

• Candidates must reside in the US or Canada.

🏝️ Benefits

• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

• Company-funded budget for AI coding assistants.

• Access to cutting-edge models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

• 100% remote work with a global remote culture.

• Opportunities for career advancement.

• In-person onboarding experience.

• 30 days of annual leave each year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days.

• Transparent communication and regular updates across the company.

• Autonomy and support to deliver exceptional work.

• A culture of empowerment, high trust, and low ego.

• Global annual leave policy, adhering to local laws.