Grafana Labs - Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope | Germany | Remote

• 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. • Lead projects from concept to rollout • Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity. • Design, build, and operate core components • 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. • Wear the product hat. • Drive operational excellence. Own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter. • Drive operational excellence. • Partner across Grafana. Work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and the other Databases squads to make profiles useful wherever engineers work. • Partner across Grafana. • Support your teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup. • Support your teammates • Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build, and treat incident response and post-incident learning as part of the craft. • Participate in on-call • Contribute to open source. Pyroscope is OSS. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project in the open. • Contribute to open source. • 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. • Adaptive Profiles: • Large queries: query fairness, async execution, and autoscaling of the read path so long queries from our largest tenants run efficiently at any scale. • Large queries: • Traces and profiles together: bi-directional correlation between traces and profiles, so a slow request links straight to the code that burned the CPU. • Traces and profiles together: • 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. • Agent-ready Pyroscope: • BYOC and regions: cell lifecycle automation, from provisioning to migration, targeting a new cell end to end with zero manual steps. • BYOC and regions: • OTel-native profiling: evolve ingestion, storage, and query as OpenTelemetry profiling matures, keeping Pyroscope the natural backend for OTel profiles. • OTel-native profiling: • What Makes You a Great Fit • 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). • Solid experience with a systems language. • 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. • Distributed systems in production. • 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. • Product sense. • 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. • Curiosity and courage. • Strong software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize versus when to ship. • Strong software craftsmanship. • Operational mindset. You have carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code, and treat reliability as a feature. • Operational mindset. • Pragmatism. You break complex problems into short feedback loops: analyze, design, deliver an MVP, learn, iterate. • Pragmatism. • Clear communication. You work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment and lead through writing, reviews, and shipped code. • Clear communication.