Senior Backend Engineer (Databases Pyroscope)

• We build Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles
• Pyroscope gives engineers code-level visibility into how their applications use CPU and memory, down to the specific line of code, and connects that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack
• 2026 is an inflection point for Pyroscope
• We completed the rollout of our V2 architecture, cutting production costs by 92% while significantly improving scalability, and grew the number of customers using the product by 64% last year
• The product is moving beyond profiling-savvy users, and our focus is shifting from standalone feature development to reducing friction across the full experience: better onboarding, deeper integration with the rest of Grafana, and profiles that work for operational and SRE workflows, not just performance specialists
• Over the next year, you will help us:
• Ship Adaptive Profiles as the default ingestion strategy, so customers automatically collect the profiles they need at a cost that makes sense
• Turn Pyroscope into a platform capability inside Grafana: bi-directional trace-to-profile correlation, integration with Kubernetes Monitoring and App Observability, and profiles surfaced where engineers already start their investigations
• Prepare Pyroscope for an agent-driven world: APIs, CLI, and docs designed so AI agents can drive profiling end to end, covering the full performance optimization lifecycle from finding an issue to verifying the fix
• Push operational excellence and TCO further: generalized autoscaling, better UX for long queries, and BYOC automation that brings up a new cell with zero manual intervention
• Double adoption by making profiling easy to start with: guided onboarding, use-case-driven docs, and assisted instrumentation so users get value in minutes instead of days
• As a Senior Engineer on Pyroscope, you will own meaningful projects end to end and help shape what the team builds next
• 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
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity
• 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
• Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter
• Partner across Grafana. Work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and the other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work
• Support your teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, and treat incident response and post-incident learning as part of the craft
• Contribute to open source. Pyroscope is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open
• We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction
• We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-5.6, Claude Fable, Gemini Pro 3.1)
• Example problems you could work on:
• These are the kinds of projects landing this year:
• Adaptive Profiles: sampling and aggregation strategies that keep the signal while cutting cost and noise, plus the ingestion metrics that make its behavior transparent to customers
• Large queries: query fairness, async execution, and autoscaling of the read path so long queries from our largest tenants run efficiently at any scale
• Traces and profiles together: bi-directional correlation between traces and profiles, so a slow request links straight to the code that burned the CPU
• Agent-ready Pyroscope: structured, deterministic APIs and a CLI that AI assistants can drive reliably, plus the benchmarks to prove tool quality and catch regressions
• BYOC and regions: cell lifecycle automation, from provisioning to migration, targeting a new cell end to end with zero manual steps
• OTel-native profiling: evolve ingestion, storage, and query as OpenTelemetry profiling matures, keeping Pyroscope the natural backend for OTel profiles

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption- This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Ireland only
• Distributed systems in production. You have built and operated cloud services and understand what it takes to keep a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable
• Curiosity and courage. Pyroscope is nearing feature completeness while still refining product-market fit. We need someone who asks hard questions and challenges the status quo when appropriate
• Operational mindset. You have carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code, and treat reliability as a feature
• Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize versus when to ship
• Solid experience with a systems language. We write Pyroscope in Go; experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc)
• Clear communication. You work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code
• Pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate
• Product sense. You are comfortable talking to customers, sitting with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables. Since we have no dedicated PM, this matters as much as your code
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems
• Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tooling
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs
• Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar in a previous role (or on a homelab)