Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo
Core
Senior Backend Engineer owning technical direction for Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend powering Grafana Cloud and Enterprise Traces.
Role type
Senior IC backend engineer (distributed systems/databases)
Builds
Tempo platform (distributed tracing backend, ingestion, storage, query engine, metrics generation)
Domain
Observability, distributed systems, backend infrastructure
Required skills
Go, distributed data systems, system design, performance optimization, operational excellence, API design, Kubernetes, SLO management, code review, technical documentation
Preferred skills
OpenTelemetry, TraceQL, columnar storage (Parquet), multi-tenant SaaS, AI/LLM interface design, Rust/C/C++
Technologies
Go, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, TraceQL, Parquet, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google models
Responsibilities
Own technical direction for major Tempo roadmap initiatives (aggregation, autoscaling, query performance); Design and implement APIs for human and agent consumption; Contribute to ingestion, storage, and query components; Mentor engineers and conduct code reviews; Participate in on-call and incident response; Engage with the open-source community.
Seniority
Senior, hands-on IC
