Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

About Grafana Labs and Pyroscope

Grafana Labs, creators of the trusted Grafana Cloud observability platform used by over 10,000 organizations, supports a remote workforce across more than 40 countries. Pyroscope is their open-source continuous profiling database that empowers engineers with code-level insights into application CPU and memory usage, integrated seamlessly with metrics, logs, and traces in the Grafana ecosystem. The company continues to innovate while maintaining an open-source culture and collaborative environment.

Role Overview

You will join as a Senior Backend Engineer focusing on Pyroscope, owning end-to-end projects that advance scalability, cost efficiency, and user experience. This role involves close collaboration with customer teams, cross-functional partnerships, and contributing to open-source development.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead projects from initial concept to deployment, including design, delivery, and operational management.
• Develop core distributed database components such as ingestion, storage, and querying, balancing performance, cost, and complexity.
• Act as a product advocate by engaging with customers, translating feedback into actionable development roadmaps.
• Drive operational excellence by meeting service-level objectives, cost targets, automating toil reduction, and participating in on-call rotations.
• Collaborate with multiple teams within Grafana to enhance profile usability across the platform.
• Support team members through design discussions, code reviews, and pair programming in a fully remote setting.
• Engage actively with the open-source community through contributions and project stewardship.

Major Initiatives and Challenges

• Implement Adaptive Profiles for optimized data collection at sustainable costs.
• Enhance query capabilities including fairness, asynchronous execution, and autoscaling for large tenant workloads.
• Build bi-directional trace-to-profile correlation and integration with Kubernetes and application observability.
• Prepare Pyroscope for agent-driven profiling with structured APIs, CLI tools suited for AI agents, and quality benchmarks.
• Automate cell lifecycle management for Bring Your Own Cluster (BYOC) and regional expansion.
• Evolve the platform to support OpenTelemetry native profiling standards.

Desired Qualifications

• Proficiency in at least one systems programming language such as Go (primary), Rust, C, C++, Python, or Java.
• Experience building and operating production-level distributed cloud services ensuring speed, reliability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Strong product intuition and comfort working closely with customers to convert vague problems into clear deliverables, especially in a PM-less environment.
• Curiosity, courage to question existing approaches, and drive refinement towards product-market fit.
• Exceptional software craftsmanship with a focus on clean, maintainable, and efficient code.
• Operational mindset with experience in infrastructure as code, SRE practices, or pager duties emphasizing reliability.
• Pragmatic approach to iterative development, balancing quick delivery with continuous improvement.
• Excellent communication skills adapted to remote and asynchronous collaboration environments.

Additional Preferable Experience

• Familiarity with profiling and performance tools such as flamegraphs, pprof, or perf.
• Knowledge of OpenTelemetry or managing large-scale observability systems.
• Expertise operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure on Kubernetes at scale.
• Building APIs and metadata services for AI/LLM consumers with deterministic results.
• Open-source contributions or community engagement experience.
• Usage or operational knowledge of Grafana, Prometheus, or Pyroscope in on-call or homelab setups.
• Working effectively in fully remote, distributed teams.

Work Culture and Benefits

• 100% remote employment with a global, collaborative culture that values transparency, autonomy, and innovation.
• Opportunity to help scale a fast-growing, impactful open-source company.
• Inclusive workplace that champions diversity and equal opportunity.
• Competitive remuneration in Ireland ranging from €104,000 to €124,800 plus Restricted Stock Units aligning employee and company success.
• Access to advanced AI coding assistants and frontier AI models to boost developer productivity.
• Generous annual leave policy including 3 dedicated company shutdown days for work-life balance.
• Structured onboarding with in-person sessions to integrate new team members effectively.