Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote
About the role
The Opportunity:
We build Tempo, 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.
What You'll Be Doing:
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.
- Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements.
- Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost.