# Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote at Grafana

- Company: Grafana
- What the company does: Avoid lock-in and ensure reliability with Grafana Cloud. The AI-powered platform built on open standards unifies metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and business data. Backed by Lightspeed, Sequoia and Sapphire.
- Company website: https://grafana.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: United States (Remote)
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $175K to $210K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-04-27
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/grafanalabs/jobs/5982444004
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/grafana-staff-backend-engineer-databases-tempo-us-remote/

## About the role

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.

## What they're looking for

- 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
- 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

Tags: R&D : Databases