Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company building Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform. We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to lead the next phase of our Tempo tracing backend, turning it from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s upcoming observability products.

The Opportunity
Tempo is the open‑source distributed tracing backend for Grafana Cloud Traces. In 2026, we will focus on product and operational excellence, evolving Tempo into a higher‑density platform for AI‑driven assistants and large‑scale observability workflows.

Over the Next Year, You Will Help Us

Deliver reliable Grafana Cloud Traces by removing rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failures.

Achieve operational excellence at scale, expanding from ~50 to triple‑digit cells with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and reduced toil.

Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler with higher‑density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics, and LLM‑friendly interfaces.

Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and 30‑day query ranges.





Prepare Tempo for an agent‑driven world with larger, burstier workloads and new AI‑powered workflows.

What You’ll Be Doing

Lead multi‑quarter technical initiatives such as trace aggregation APIs, limitless Tempo, autoscaling, and query engine improvements.

Own the architecture of core Tempo components—ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation—and drive design reviews.

Design APIs for humans and agents, shaping the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces.

Drive operational excellence under concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB).

Partner with Product and sibling teams to ship features that unblock them.

Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, pairing, and documentation.

Participate in on‑call rotation and incident response.

Contribute to Tempo’s open‑source community by reviewing external contributions.

Example Problems You Could Wo

📌 Staff Software Engineer (Madrid)
🏢 Grafana Labs
📍 Madrid