Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo

Join a remote-first engineering team building and scaling a distributed tracing platform that helps organizations understand application performance and troubleshoot complex systems. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will shape the technical direction of core backend components, from data ingestion and storage to query execution and metrics generation. You will lead significant engineering initiatives focused on reliability, scalability, operational excellence, and performance. Your work will help evolve the platform into a foundation for advanced observability products and AI-powered workflows. Collaborating with product managers and engineers across teams, you will deliver robust APIs and capabilities for both human users and automated agents. This role offers substantial technical ownership, opportunities to mentor other engineers, and the chance to contribute to an open-source project in a globally distributed environment.

• Demonstrated experience delivering complex, multi-month software engineering projects, including technical design, implementation, deployment, and production support.

• Strong hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution systems, or comparable infrastructure.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with the ability to write clean, maintainable, reliable, and performant code.

• Solid experience with Go, or substantial systems programming experience in languages such as Rust, C, or C++ and the ability to develop proficiency in Go.

• Experience operating production services, participating in on-call rotations, troubleshooting incidents, improving service reliability, and reducing operational toil.

• A practical, customer-focused approach to engineering, including breaking complex problems into manageable deliverables, gathering feedback, and iterating on solutions.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document technical decisions and collaborate effectively in an asynchronous, remote-first environment.

• Ability to work across teams, influence technical direction, provide constructive feedback, and help other engineers grow.

Additional experience that would be an advantage:

• Experience with distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability platforms.

• Experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or APIs consumed by other services and automated agents.

• Familiarity with columnar storage formats such as Parquet or specialized storage formats for analytical workloads.

• Experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure across multiple cells on Kubernetes.

• Experience building systems for AI or large language model consumers, including structured APIs, metadata discovery, deterministic responses, and evaluation frameworks.

• Open-source contributions or project maintainership, with an interest in collaborating with developer communities.

• Previous experience using or supporting observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in production or personal projects.

• Experience working with globally distributed teams in a fully remote environment.