Scan your resume against ATS criteria for this Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote role at Grafana Labs.
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at http://grafana.com grafana.com and follow us on https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/ LinkedIn and https://twitter.com/grafana X.
We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
We build
, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.
2026 is an inflection point for Tempo. After a major architectural upgrade and the launch of TraceQL metrics, we are shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence, and evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products (App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants).
Over the next year, you will help us:
Make Grafana Cloud Traces “just work” for customers by eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes.
Achieve operational excellence at scale as we grow from close to 50 cells today into triple digits this year, with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and aggressive toil reduction.
Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler: higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics math, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces that downstream products and agents can build on.
Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges to match competitors.
Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows, such as assistant-driven triage and “why is this slow?”- style investigations.
As a Staff Engineer on Tempo, you will set technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team.
from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements.
of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team.
Shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably.
Own outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
Work closely with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them.
Raise the engineering bar through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and writing that leaves the team smarter than you found it.
for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning.
Tempo is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026. Any of them is a Staff-sized problem:
A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and made the teams around you better.
Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar.
You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship.
We write Tempo in Go. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
You’ve owned production services, carried a pager, reduced toil, and treated SLOs as a product feature, not a chore.
You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate.
You lead through design docs, reviews, and shipped code, not hierarchy. You communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.
Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents).
Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.
Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses.
Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open.
Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in a previous role (or on a homelab).
Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.
We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.
In the United Kingdom, the Base compensation range for this role is GBP 103,958 - GBP 124,750. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed https://grafana.com/about/careers/#jobs here.
*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process
*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.
As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
– Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
– Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
– Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
– Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
– High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
– Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
– Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
– Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
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_For information about how your personal data is used you’ve applied to a job, check out our https://grafana.com/legal/applicant-and-candidate-privacy-policy/ privacy policy. _
How to apply for Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote at Grafana Labs?
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What is the salary for this role?
Salary details will be discussed during the interview.
What experience is required?
This position is open to freshers and experienced candidates.
Is this position still open?
Yes, currently active and accepting applications.
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