Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope | Spain | Remote

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

Senior Backend Engineer for 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 Grafana stack. A key focus is preparing Pyroscope for an agent-driven world, enabling AI agents to manage the full performance optimization lifecycle. The role also emphasizes operational excellence, cross-team collaboration, and open-source contribution. The company uses AI coding assistants and has access to frontier models, but the core product is observability, not AI model development.

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

  • distributed database design
  • distributed database operations
  • performance optimization
  • cost optimization
  • complexity management
  • customer interaction
  • roadmap shaping
  • SLO management
  • unit cost targets
  • automation
  • on-call experience
  • cross-functional collaboration
  • open source contribution
  • code review
  • remote collaboration

Nice to have

  • backend engineering
  • database ingestion
  • database storage
  • database query
  • product management
  • incident response
  • post-incident learning
  • community engagement
  • external contribution review
  • Kubernetes Monitoring
  • App Observability
  • trace-to-profile correlation
  • AI coding assistants

What the JD emphasized

  • prepare Pyroscope for an agent-driven world
  • AI agents can drive profiling end to end
  • use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow
  • pragmatic AI-assisted development