Staff Software Engineer (Databases)

TL;DR

Staff Software Engineer (Databases): Building and evolving Tempo, the distributed tracing backend for Grafana Cloud, with an accent on operational excellence, scale, and AI-driven observability. Focus on designing high-density APIs, improving query performance, and creating LLM-friendly interfaces for next-generation observability products.

Location: Remote (Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany)

Salary: GBP 103,958 - 124,750

Company

hirify.global is the company behind the open observability cloud, focusing on open source, open standards, and a 100% remote global culture.

What you will do

• Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives for Tempo, including trace aggregation APIs and autoscaling cells.
• Own the architecture of core components: ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation.
• Design structured, deterministic APIs for humans and AI agents to build on Tempo reliably.
• Drive operational excellence by owning SLOs and reducing toil through automation and parameterized rollouts.
• Mentor engineers through code review, design feedback, and pairing on complex problems.
• Contribute to the Tempo open-source project and engage with the community.

Requirements

• Track record of leading complex, multi-quarter initiatives from problem framing through rollout.
• Substantial experience building and operating distributed data systems in production.
• Strong software craftsmanship in Go or other systems languages (Rust, C, C++).
• Operational mindset with experience owning production services and treating SLOs as a product feature.
• Must be located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany.
• Ability to communicate effectively in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with OpenTelemetry, tracing, or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or analytical on-disk formats.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building structured APIs for AI/LLM consumers.
• Open-source maintainership or active contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% remote work environment with a collaborative, high-trust global culture.
• Company-funded budget for modern AI coding assistants and access to frontier models.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days, including 3 reserved shutdown days.
• Defined career growth pathways and transparent, approachable leadership.
• In-person onboarding to integrate with the team from day one.