Staff Backend Engineer – Databases

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Canada.

📋 Description

• Spearhead multi-quarter technical projects from initial problem identification through to implementation, such as trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or enhancements to the query engine.

• Take ownership of the architecture for core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Facilitate design reviews, make informed trade-offs regarding performance, cost, and complexity, and document the rationale for the team.

• Develop APIs tailored for both human users and agents. Influence the evolution of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) to enable Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators to reliably build on Tempo.

• Be accountable for results against specific SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and drive the team towards Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.

• Collaborate closely with PMs and teams such as App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant to comprehend how Tempo is utilized and deliver solutions that remove obstacles for them.

• Elevate the engineering standards through code reviews, constructive design feedback, collaborative problem-solving, and writing that enhances the team's knowledge.

• Engage in on-call duties for the services you contribute to, acting as a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident analysis.

• Tempo is an open-source project. You will interact with the community, review external contributions, and help guide the project in a transparent manner.

⛳️ Requirements

• A proven history of leading intricate, multi-quarter initiatives that encompassed design, delivery, and operations, while enhancing the capabilities of the teams around you.

• Significant hands-on experience in building and managing distributed data systems in a production environment: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar areas.

• You produce clean, robust, high-performance software that is maintainable by others, and you recognize when to optimize versus when to deploy.

• Tempo is written in Go. Extensive experience in other systems programming languages (Rust, C, C++) is highly applicable.

• You have managed production services, handled a pager, minimized toil, and viewed SLOs as a product feature rather than a task.

• You decompose complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, and iterate.

• You lead through design documentation, reviews, and delivered code, not through authority. Your communication is clear in a fully remote, asynchronous setting.

🏝️ Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture

• Scaling Organization

• Transparent Communication

• Innovation-Driven

• Open Source Roots

• Empowered Teams

• Career Growth Pathways

• Approachable Leadership

• Passionate People

• In-Person Onboarding

• Balance is Key