About the Role
The Opportunity
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.
What You'll Be Doing
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 actionable tasks, and ensure we are building the right things.
Requirements
Distributed databases
Experience in designing and operating core components of distributed databases.
Backend development
Strong skills in backend development, particularly in building scalable systems.
Project leadership
Proven ability to lead projects from concept to rollout.
Customer collaboration
Experience in working directly with customers to gather requirements and feedback.
Nice to Have
Familiarity with open source projects and communities.
Understanding of Kubernetes and its monitoring capabilities.
Benefits
Remote work
Enjoy the flexibility of working from anywhere.
Collaborative culture
Be part of a global team that values transparency and autonomy.