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.

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.
• Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges.
• Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows.

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.
• Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Design APIs for humans and agents.
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs.
• Partner with Product and sibling teams.
• Mentor engineers.
• Participate in on-call for the services you help build.
• Contribute to open source.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
• Deep systems experience. Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship.
• Strong Go, or a path to it.
• Operational mindset.
• Customer focus and pragmatism.
• Leadership through writing and collaboration.

Bonus Points for

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically.
• Experience with columnar storage formats.
• Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

Compensation & Rewards

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 here.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• Balance is Key - 30 days annual leave per annum