Senior Backend Engineer (Databases)

TL;DR

Senior Backend Engineer (Databases): Building and optimizing Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database, with an accent on ingestion, storage, and query efficiency. Focus on implementing adaptive profiles, bi-directional trace-to-profile correlation, and preparing the system for AI-agent driven profiling.

Location: Must be based in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, or Ireland

Salary: €104,000 - €124,800 (for Ireland)

Company

The company behind the open observability cloud, focusing on open source, open standards, and open culture.

What you will do

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, including design, delivery, and operations for distributed database components.
• Design and operate core components of a distributed database, focusing on ingestion, storage, and query paths.
• Collaborate directly with customers to translate pain points into technical deliverables and shape the product roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence by owning SLOs, reducing toil via automation, and participating in the EMEA on-call rotation.
• Contribute to the open-source Pyroscope community by reviewing external contributions and steering project direction.
• Partner with other Grafana squads to integrate profiles across the observability stack.

Requirements

• Solid experience with a systems language, specifically Go.
• Proven track record of building and operating distributed cloud services in production.
• Strong product sense and ability to navigate ambiguity without a dedicated PM.
• High standards of software craftsmanship, writing clean and performant maintainable code.
• Operational mindset with experience in SRE practices or infrastructure as code.
• Must be based in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden, or Ireland.

Nice to have

• Experience with profiling tools like flamegraphs, pprof, or perf.
• Knowledge of OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS on Kubernetes.
• Experience building structured APIs for AI/LLM consumers.
• Open-source maintainership or significant contributions.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% remote-first global culture with high trust and autonomy.
• Competitive compensation including Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days, including 3 company shutdown days.
• Budget for modern AI coding assistants and access to frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini).
• In-person onboarding process for new hires.
• Transparent communication and open decision-making.