Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

This Staff Backend Engineer role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to Grafana Tempo, a critical open-source distributed tracing backend. You'll build and operate scalable systems that power observability for global organizations, directly impacting how users monitor their critical applications.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and make continuous improvements.
• Lead projects from initial concept through implementation, including providing ongoing customer support.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain essential systems, ensuring high reliability, performance, and availability.
• Actively influence the product roadmap and your personal career objectives.
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you oversee.
• Support and mentor team members, engage in design discussions, and work closely with colleagues.
• Expand your skill set by deepening your knowledge of our cloud products, understanding customer needs, and learning our codebase.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar are transferable).
• Proven ability to lead projects from requirements gathering to product delivery in a self-driven manner.
• Experience developing cloud-native software or with systems engineering.
• Proficiency in writing clean, robust, performant, and easily maintainable software.
• Familiarity with on-call rotations, SRE tasks, or the concept of infrastructure as code.
• Self-motivated, customer-focused, and pragmatic in breaking down complex challenges into iterative solutions.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, essential for a fully remote team.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles or personal projects.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a strong desire to learn.
• Prior experience working in a fully remote, distributed environment across multiple time zones.