Senior Backend Engineer; Databases Tempo Job Los Angeles area,California USA,Software Development

Position: Senior Backend Engineer (Databases Tempo)

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
Evolve Tempo into a platform enabler: higher-density APIs, trace aggregation, TraceQL metrics math, and machine/LLM-friendly interfaces that downstream products and agents can build on
Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges to match competitors
Prepare Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows, such as assistant-driven triage and "why is this slow?"- style investigations
As a Senior Engineer on Tempo, you will own technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team
Deliver significant technical projects. Take well-scoped, multi-month initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.g., trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements. Partner with Staff engineers and the tech lead on broader, cross-team direction
Own major components of Tempo. Contribute to and own parts of ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation. Write and present design docs, participate in design reviews, make sound trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the "why" for the team
Build APIs for humans and agents. Help shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably
Contribute to operational excellence. Own outcomes for the areas you build against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB), and help move the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts
Collaborate with Product and sibling teams. Work with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them
Mentor and support engineers. Raise the bar through thorough code review, constructive design feedback, and pairing, especially with junior and mid-level engineers
Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning
Contribute to open source. Tempo is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and contribute to the project in the open
We invest heavily in developer productivity
You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards
You’ll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
Example problems you could work on
These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026:
Trace aggregation and higher-density APIs: extend TraceQL metrics, design LLM-friendly response types, and make Tempo a first-class data source for Grafana’s AI assistant
Autoscaling end-to-end: customer limits and Tempo cells, with hysteresis, predictive scaling for spikes, and safe scale-down
Agent-scale ingestion and query: guardrails for bursty, high-cardinality, agent-generated workloads
Query performance: new data…