Staff Software Engineer

About the role

This position centers on end to end ownership of Tempo, the open source distributed tracing backend that powers Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces. You will translate ambitious product goals into production reality by owning intake, architecture, implementation, review, delivery, and ecosystem collaboration. The role demands deep technical judgment and strong ownership across the entire lifecycle of distributed tracing systems. You will be responsible for ensuring that Tempo remains performant, reliable, and scalable under demanding multi tenant conditions. Compensation for this role is structured as 260000 USD over two years for a position based in Sweden with remote engagement. You will partner closely with product and platform teams to define the future direction of tracing infrastructure at scale.

Key facts

What you'll do

Architect ingestion pipelines that normalize high cardinality trace data while meeting strict service level objectives. Design storage layouts that balance query latency and cost for multi tenant trace workloads. Refine query engines to sustain sub second latency even during megabyte scale scans. Streamline release workflows so operational upgrades remain safe across globally distributed deployments. Coordinate with product teams to align Tempo capabilities with customer journey expectations and product outcomes. Enable partners and external integrations by stabilizing public APIs and observability signals. Champion reliability practices that reduce incident recurrence across development and deployment pipelines. Define platform guardrails that allow autonomous teams to move quickly without compromising system integrity or performance. Evaluate and integrate emerging standards in observability to keep Tempo at the forefront of tracing innovation. Drive technical discovery and prototyping to validate new approaches for scalable trace processing.

Requirements

You must have built large scale distributed systems that process trace workloads in production environments. You must demonstrate experience designing storage formats and query execution for time series and trace data at scale. You must show proven ability operating cloud native systems in remote first or distributed team environments. You must possess strong written communication skills to collaborate effectively across time zones and cultures. You must be comfortable making technical decisions with incomplete information and owning the outcomes. You must have a deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consensus, replication, and fault tolerance. You must be able to break down complex problems into manageable components and execute against them reliably. You must have a track record of contributing to production grade observability platforms that serve demanding customers.

Nice to have

Experience contributing to open source observability projects that span multiple ecosystems and observability layers is valued.

Skills & tools

Tempo

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Practical notes

Please before proceeding. Verify specific eligibility criteria, location requirements, and compensation terms as part of your application process. This role is based in Sweden with remote engagement and offers a compensation package of 260000 USD over two years. Applicants are encouraged to to ensure alignment with personal circumstances and expectations. The position is full time and requires readiness to contribute in a fully remote, globally distributed environment.

Why this role matters at Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is founded on open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and an open culture. Grafana Cloud delivers a flexible, fully managed observability platform built for scale. With purpose driven AI capabilities, the platform helps organizations see, understand, and act on disparate data to match the speed of their ambitions. The company serves more than 35 million users and 7000 customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Grafana Labs maintains a 100% remote setup with over 1600 team members across more than 40 countries, supported by leading investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. This role supports Tempo's evolution from foundational work to product and operational excellence, preparing the platform for agent driven workloads, higher density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics, and machine learning assisted investigations. By joining this team, you will play a critical part in shaping how the industry moves from metrics to traces and toward increasingly intelligent observability workflows.

Equal opportunity statement

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, or age.

Apply with confidence

If this role excites you, raise your hand for a career defining opportunity. Grafana Labs encourages candidates who may not meet every requirement to apply, recognizing that potential can take many forms.

About the company

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.