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. 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).
What You'll Be Doing
- 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.
- Own the architecture of core Tempo components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Drive design reviews, make sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team.
- Design APIs for humans and agents. Shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces so that downstream products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably.
- Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB) and push the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts.
- Partner with Product and sibling teams. Work closely with PMs and engineering teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them.
- Mentor engineers. Raise the engineering bar through code review, design feedback, pairing on hard problems, and documentation.
- Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and be a force multiplier in incident response and post-incident learning.
- Contribute to open source. Engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open.
What Makes You a Great Fit
- Technical leadership. A track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives that spanned design, delivery, and operations.
- Deep systems experience. Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar.
- Strong software craftsmanship. Ability to write clean, robust, performant software and make effective trade-offs.
- Strong Go, or a path to it. We write Tempo in Go. Deep experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.
- Operational mindset. Experience owning production services, carrying a pager, reducing toil, and managing SLOs.
- Customer focus and pragmatism. Ability to break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, and iterate.
- Leadership through writing and collaboration. Clear communication in a fully remote, asynchronous environment using design docs and code reviews.