Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

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.

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from USA time zones only at this time, with a strong preference to EST timezones. 

Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Tempo   The Opportunity: 

We are the developers of Tempo, an open source distributed tracing backend that is user-friendly, scalable, and a key component of Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo allows users to easily search for traces, create metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs and metrics. Our team, focused on back-end development, collaborates closely with customers and the Grafana Cloud teams to provide Tempo for on-premises use and at scale in the cloud.

In our expansive domain, some of the projects we have undertaken include:

- Creating and operating distributed systems to efficiently handle tracing ingestion and queries
- Developing TraceQL, a query language specifically designed for selecting traces in Tempo, inspired by PromQL and LogQL
- Building and improving the metrics-generator, a Tempo component that generates metrics from ingested traces

Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations for monitoring critical applications and infrastructure. We value creativity and diverse perspectives, encouraging each team member to contribute ideas that enhance our product as a reliable tool.

What You’ll Be Doing:

- Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and make improvements
- Lead projects from concept to implementation, including ongoing customer support
- Design, build, operate, and maintain essential systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability
- Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives 
- Participate in on-call rotations and take responsibility for the services you oversee
- Support and mentor team members, engage in design conversations, and work closely with colleagues
- Expand your skill set by deepening your knowledge of our cloud products, understanding our customers, and learning about our codebase

We are a remote-first organization that meets regularly via video calls and communicates asynchronously through documents. An independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

- You are a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action
- You are customer-focused.
- We build everything with our users in mind.
- Pragmatism: You can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively.
- Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must.

Requirements:

- Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar, then that translates well.
- Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas, all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way.
- Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud, or some experience with systems engineering.
- Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.
- Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks, or with the concept of infrastructure as code

Bonus Points For:

- Experience working with Kubernetes
- Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
- Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
- Experience working in a fully remote, distributed environment where teams operate across multiple time zones

Compensation & Rewards:

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 168,256 - USD 201,907. 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.

All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

\*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.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

- 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
- Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
- Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
- Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- In-Person onboarding - 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. 
- Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. \*We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.

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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