Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | US | Remote

Responsibilities

• 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.

Languages