Staff Software Engineer - Databases, Tempo | Ireland | Remote

Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems.

Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents).

Experience with columnar storage formats (e.g., Parquet) or purpose-built on-disk formats for analytical workloads.

Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.

Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses.

Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR

117,600

- EUR

141,120

.  Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed

here

, 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.

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:

Make Grafana Cloud Traces “just work” for customers by eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes.

Achieve operational excellence at scale as we grow from close to 50 cells today into triple digits this year, with autoscaling, parameterized rollouts, and aggressive toil reduction.

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.