Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | United Kingdom | Remote

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale.

Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions.

Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs.

We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P.

Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.

Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X .

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 located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland or Germany.

Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Tempo

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 (App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants).

Over the next year, you will help us:

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.

We invest heavily in developer productivity.

You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.

We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.

You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1).

Example problems you could work on:

These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026. Any one of them is a Staff-sized problem:

What Makes You a Great Fit:

Bonus Points for: