Senior Backend Engineer, Distributed Tracing Databases (Remote - US and Canada)

This is a senior backend role at a fast-growing, fully remote observability software company whose platform is built on open source and open standards. The team owns an open-source distributed tracing backend that powers the company's managed cloud offering and its enterprise edition. The focus for the coming year is moving from foundational build-out to product reliability, operational excellence across a rapidly growing fleet of deployments, and new APIs that AI-driven tools and external integrators can use.

What you'll do

• Lead multi-month technical projects covering ingestion, storage, query execution, and metrics generation, from problem framing through rollout and operations.
• Write design documents, take part in design reviews, and make clear trade-offs between performance, cost, and complexity.
• Shape structured, deterministic APIs intended for both human users and automated or LLM-based consumers.
• Own service-level objectives such as write latency, incident recurrence, and cost per ingested GB, and reduce operational toil through automation and safer rollouts.
• Work with product managers and neighbouring engineering teams to ship what unblocks their products.
• Review code, mentor junior and mid-level engineers, and contribute to the project in the open with the external community.

What you need

• A track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects that covered design, delivery, and operations.
• Significant hands-on experience building and running distributed data systems in production, such as ingestion pipelines, storage engines, or query execution.
• Strong experience in Go, or in another systems language such as Rust, C, or C++, with a willingness to work in Go.
• Experience carrying a pager for production services and treating SLOs as a product concern.
• Clear written communication skills for a fully remote, asynchronous team.
• Must be based in the United States or Canada to apply.

How to apply

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