Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope | Ireland | Remote

Grafana Labs Grafana Labs · Data AI · EMEA · R&D : Databases

Senior Backend Engineer role focused on developing and scaling Pyroscope, an open-source continuous profiling database. The role involves leading projects from concept to rollout, designing and operating core database components, and contributing to the integration of Pyroscope within the broader Grafana stack. A key aspect is preparing Pyroscope for an agent-driven world, enabling AI agents to manage the performance optimization lifecycle. The role also emphasizes operational excellence, customer engagement, and open-source contribution. The company utilizes AI coding assistants and frontier models to enhance developer productivity.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead projects from concept to rollout, e.g. Read path efficiency improvement, or trace-to-profile correlation, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
  2. Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
  3. Wear the product hat. We have no dedicated PM: engineers on this team join customer calls, translate pain points into manageable deliverables, and directly shape the roadmap. Your questions and ideas will steer what we build.
  4. Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter.
  5. Partner across Grafana. Work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and the other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work.

Skills

Required

  • Backend engineering
  • Distributed systems
  • Database design
  • Performance optimization
  • Cost optimization
  • Customer interaction
  • Roadmap shaping
  • Operational excellence
  • SLOs
  • Automation
  • On-call
  • Incident response
  • Open source contribution
  • Code review
  • Remote collaboration

Nice to have

  • Observability
  • Profiling
  • Kubernetes
  • Trace-to-profile correlation
  • API design
  • CLI design
  • Autoscaling
  • Onboarding
  • Instrumentation

What the JD emphasized

  • AI agents can drive profiling end to end
  • AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow
  • pragmatic AI-assisted development