Staff Software Engineer – Databases, Tempo

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud. More than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers rely on it — including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Salesforce. The company is 100% remote with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, backed by Lightspeed, Sequoia, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG and Lead Edge.

The team

You would work on Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. Tempo lets teams search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics and profiles across the Grafana stack.

2026 is described as an inflection point. After a major architectural upgrade and the launch of TraceQL metrics, the team is shifting from foundational work toward product and operational excellence — evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform underpinning Grafana's next generation of observability products.

What you would do

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query and metrics generation
• Design APIs for both humans and agents — structured, deterministic and discoverable enough for LLM-driven assistants and external integrators to build on
• Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs including P99 write latency, incident recurrence and cost per ingested GB
• Partner with Product and sibling teams across App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown and Grafana Assistant
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback and pairing
• Participate in on-call for services you help build
• Contribute in the open — Tempo is open source, so you would review external contributions and help steer the project publicly

What makes you a good fit

• A track record leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives spanning design, delivery and operations
• Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production
• Strong Go, or a clear path to it. Deep experience in Rust, C or C++ translates well
• Operational mindset — you have owned production services, carried a pager and treated SLOs as a product feature
• Leadership through writing and collaboration rather than hierarchy, in a fully remote async environment

Bonus points

Tracing or OpenTelemetry experience, query language and API design, columnar storage formats such as Parquet, multi-tenant multi-cell SaaS on Kubernetes, building for AI/LLM consumers, open-source maintainership, or having been an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki or Tempo.

On AI tooling

Grafana invests heavily here and is specific about it. You get your choice of AI coding assistants within security guidelines, backed by a company-funded usage budget, plus access to frontier models. They encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development — prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation — always paired with strong code review.

Compensation and benefits

• Germany base range: €109,709 – €131,651. Ranges are country-specific; if you apply from another listed country your recruiter discusses that market's range at the start of the process
• Restricted Stock Units for every team member — Grafana states all roles include RSUs
• Bonus where applicable
• 30 days annual leave globally, three of which are reserved as company Shutdown Days so the whole team disconnects at once
• In-person onboarding with your fellow new joiners

Location — read this carefully

The job title says Germany, but the body of the listing states the role is open to applicants located in Spain, Sweden, the UK, Ireland or Germany.

That is five countries, not one, so this is filed as Europe rather than Germany. If you are in any of those five, you are eligible regardless of what the title implies.

The application asks whether you reside in Germany, whether you are eligible to work in your country of residence, and whether you require visa sponsorship — so expect existing work authorisation to be needed rather than sponsorship offered.

One more note

Grafana discloses that it uses AI tools to help match CVs against job postings, with the recruitment team continuing to review inbound CVs manually.