Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo (Go)

Location: Remote within the United States or Canada

Salary: USD $154,445–$185,334 annual OTE/Base compensation in the US; compensation varies by location, level, experience, and skillset.

Company

hirify.global develops Grafana Cloud, a managed observability platform built on open source and open standards, serving more than 10,000 organizations.

What you will do

• Lead multi-month technical initiatives for Tempo from problem framing through rollout, including trace aggregation APIs, autoscaling cells, customer limits, and query engine improvements.
• Own components across ingestion, storage, query execution, and metrics generation while making trade-offs across performance, cost, and complexity.
• Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for Grafana products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators.
• Improve operational excellence through automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, SLO ownership, and toil reduction.
• Collaborate with Product and sibling teams, mentor engineers, participate in on-call and incident response, and contribute to the Tempo open-source project.

Requirements

• Experience delivering complex, multi-month projects across design, implementation, and operations.
• Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution systems.
• Strong software engineering skills with a focus on clean, robust, and performant code.
• Strong Go experience, or substantial systems-language experience in Rust, C, or C++ with a path to Go.
• Experience owning production services, working with on-call rotations, reducing toil, and using SLOs to guide operations.
• Clear written communication and effective collaboration in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or programmatic APIs.
• Experience with columnar or analytical storage formats, multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure, Kubernetes, or multi-cell systems.
• Experience building structured APIs and evaluation workflows for AI or LLM consumers.
• Open-source contribution, Grafana ecosystem experience, or work in a globally distributed team.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first, asynchronous work with regular video meetings and a globally distributed team.
• Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants and access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
• Restricted Stock Units included with all roles.
• Annual leave policy of 30 days, including three Grafana Shutdown Days where applicable under local legislation.
• In-person onboarding for new employees.
• Open-source values, transparent communication, high autonomy, and defined career growth opportunities.