Senior Backend Engineer
Core
Building Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend for Grafana Cloud, evolving it from a SaaS database into a platform enabling AI-driven observability products.
Role type
Senior Backend Engineer (Distributed Systems)
Builds
Tempo (distributed tracing backend), APIs for agents/LLMs, ingestion pipelines, storage engines, and query execution systems.
Domain
Observability, Distributed Systems, Backend Infrastructure
Required skills
Go, distributed data systems, system design, performance optimization, SLO management, Kubernetes, API design, code review, asynchronous communication
Preferred skills
OpenTelemetry, TraceQL, columnar storage (Parquet), multi-tenant SaaS, AI/LLM integration, Rust/C/C++
Technologies
Go, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, TraceQL, Parquet, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google models
Responsibilities
Own technical direction for major Tempo components (ingestion, storage, query), design and deliver multi-month projects, optimize query performance and autoscaling, build APIs for AI agents, mentor engineers, participate in on-call and incident response, contribute to open source.
Seniority
Senior, hands-on IC
