About this role
Lead technical direction for Tempo, Grafana's open-source distributed tracing backend. Drive multi-quarter initiatives across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation while mentoring engineers and contributing to open source. Shape Tempo into a platform powering Grafana's next-generation observability products and AI-driven assistants.
Must have
Track record leading complex multi-quarter technical initiatives from design through operations
Substantial hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production
Strong software craftsmanship with clean robust performant code
Deep experience in Go or strong systems language background in Rust C or C++
Experience owning production services carrying a pager and reducing toil
Ability to break complex problems into short feedback loops with MVP iteration
Clear written communication skills for fully remote asynchronous collaboration
Technologies
Responsibilities
Lead multi-quarter technical initiatives from problem framing through rollout
Own architecture of core Tempo components ingestion storage query and metrics generation
Design APIs for humans and agents with structured deterministic discoverable interfaces
Drive operational excellence against concrete SLOs and push toward Zero Ops
Partner with Product and sibling teams to ship what unblocks downstream consumers
Mentor engineers through code review design feedback and pairing on hard problems
Participate in on-call for services you help build and multiply incident response
Contribute to open source engaging community and reviewing external contributions
Benefits
Recruitment process
100% remote company with 1600+ team members across 40+ countries
Modern AI coding assistants available with company-funded usage budget
Access to frontier models including GPT-Codex Claude Opus and Gemini Pro
Pragmatic AI-assisted development paired with strong code review standards
In-person onboarding offered for new team members
Global annual leave policy of 30 days
Restricted Stock Units included for all team members
Open source legacy with community-driven values shaping culture
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