Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote

Role overview

Lead the technical direction of a distributed tracing backend used to search traces, derive metrics from spans, and connect observability data across logs, metrics, and profiles. This staff-level role focuses on evolving the platform for product growth, higher-scale workloads, operational reliability, and AI-assisted troubleshooting. The position is remote within Canada.

Responsibilities

- Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives from problem definition through production rollout, including trace aggregation, autoscaling, customer limits, and query-engine improvements. - Own architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, querying, and metrics generation, balancing performance, cost, reliability, and complexity. - Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs that can support human users, downstream products, external integrations, and AI agents. - Improve operational performance against measures such as write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost per ingested volume through automation and better rollout practices. - Collaborate with product managers and adjacent engineering teams to understand platform needs and remove technical blockers. - Mentor engineers and raise the quality of technical design and execution across the team.

Requirements

- Staff-level experience setting technical direction for distributed systems or large-scale backend platforms. - Strong architectural experience with data ingestion, storage, query systems, and metrics or analytics generation. - Ability to lead ambiguous, cross-team initiatives and make clear trade-offs involving performance, cost, reliability, and complexity. - Experience designing dependable APIs for products, integrations, or automated consumers. - Proven focus on operational excellence, measurable service objectives, automation, and reducing engineering toil. - Effective written and verbal communication, collaboration, and technical mentorship skills.

Benefits and work setup

- Remote role for candidates based in Canada. - Global, distributed working environment with transparent communication, high autonomy, and an open-source-oriented culture. - The source describes career development opportunities, equity participation, and an annual leave policy that includes designated company shutdown days.