About the company
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo based in United States.
Responsibilities
- Lead complex, multi-month engineering projects from problem definition and technical design through implementation, rollout, and ongoing operations.
- Own and improve key backend components across data ingestion, storage, query processing, and metrics generation.
- Develop and maintain scalable APIs that support observability products, external integrations, and AI-powered assistants, emphasizing structured, predictable, and discoverable interfaces.
- Produce technical design documents, participate in architecture reviews, communicate engineering decisions, and balance performance, cost, maintainability, and complexity.
- Improve production reliability and operational efficiency by defining and tracking service-level objectives (SLOs), reducing recurring incidents, automating operational tasks, and streamlining deployments.
- Optimize query performance, ingestion throughput, storage efficiency, and support for long-range queries and increasingly demanding workloads.
- Help scale multi-tenant infrastructure through autoscaling, customer limits, safe rollouts, and operational tooling that supports growth without proportionally increasing maintenance overhead.
- Partner with product managers and adjacent engineering teams to understand their needs and deliver platform capabilities that unblock downstream products and workflows.
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design feedback, technical collaboration, and pairing.
- Participate in on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews, using lessons learned to improve system reliability.
- Contribute to open-source development by reviewing community contributions, sharing improvements, and engaging with the wider developer community.
- Use AI-assisted development tools where appropriate to support prototyping, testing, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-up while maintaining high engineering and security standards.
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience delivering complex, multi-month software engineering projects, including technical design, implementation, deployment, and production support.
- Strong hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution systems, or comparable infrastructure.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, with the ability to write clean, maintainable, reliable, and performant code.
- Solid experience with Go, or substantial systems programming experience in languages such as Rust, C, or C++ and the ability to develop proficiency in Go.
- Experience operating production services, participating in on-call rotations, troubleshooting incidents, improving service reliability, and reducing operational toil.
- A practical, customer-focused approach to engineering, including breaking complex problems into manageable deliverables, gathering feedback, and iterating on solutions.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to document technical decisions and collaborate effectively in an asynchronous, remote-first environment.
- Ability to work across teams, influence technical direction, provide constructive feedback, and help other engineers grow.
Additional experience that would be an advantage
- Experience with distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability platforms.
- Experience designing query languages, SQL- or TraceQL-like engines, or APIs consumed by other services and automated agents.
- Familiarity with columnar storage formats such as Parquet or specialized storage formats for analytical workloads.
- Experience operating large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure across multiple cells on Kubernetes.
- Experience building systems for AI or large language model consumers, including structured APIs, metadata discovery, deterministic responses, and evaluation frameworks.
- Open-source contributions or project maintainership, with an interest in collaborating with developer communities.
- Previous experience using or supporting observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo in production or personal projects.
- Experience working with globally distributed teams in a fully remote environment.
Conditions
- Compensation: Annual on-target earnings (OTE) and base compensation range of CAD $164,490–$197,389 for Canada. Actual compensation depends on the candidate’s level, experience, skills, and assessment during the hiring process.
- Equity: Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), providing an ownership stake and aligning employees with the organization’s long-term performance.
- Remote work: A remote-first working environment designed to support collaboration across countries and time zones.
- Annual leave: A global annual leav