Staff Software Engineer, Grafana Labs

• Deep, proven expertise in distributed systems engineering with Go, with a track record of owning and delivering large-scale production systems end-to-end
• Demonstrated ability to define technical direction and drive architectural decisions independently, with impact that extends beyond your immediate team
• Extensive experience building and operating low-latency, high-throughput services in distributed, multi-tenant environments
• Proven track record of leading and delivering complex, multi-quarter initiatives that span multiple teams or systems
• Ability to mentor and develop senior engineers, elevating the technical quality and capabilities of those around you
• Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and how to design systems that balance reliability, security, and product velocity
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English; able to clearly convey complex technical decisions to diverse audiences, including engineering leadership and non-technical stakeholders
• Expert-level understanding of modern identity standards and threat models (OAuth 2.x / 2.1, OIDC, SAML), and how to implement them securely at scale

Desirable

• The Identity and Access team at Grafana manages all aspects of authentication and authorization, working across both our open-source and proprietary codebases
• The Identity squad, within the team, owns the authentication layer — the protocols and flows that determine how every Grafana user proves who they are
• We are completely redesigning Grafana’s authentication at the edge — a rare opportunity to shape the technical direction of authentication infrastructure at scale, with a direct impact on millions of users every day
• Our code paths sit in the critical hot paths across Grafana’s services, making every millisecond of performance essential
• As a Staff Engineer, you will be central to defining how we evolve these systems
• As a Staff Engineer on the Identity squad, you will set the technical direction for our authentication systems and lead the most complex initiatives from conception through delivery
• You will collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product management, and cross-functional partners to define how Grafana authenticates millions of users every day
• Approximately 55% of your time will be dedicated to backend development (Golang), 25% to technical leadership and cross-team collaboration, and 20% to operations and reliability
• Define and own the technical architecture for the Identity squad’s authentication systems, including our edge authentication redesign
• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, multi-quarter initiatives in the critical path of user interaction, spanning multiple services and teams
• Mentor and develop senior engineers, providing technical guidance, design feedback, and support for their professional growth
• Serve as a technical authority for identity protocols at Grafana, driving alignment on how we implement and evolve OAuth, OIDC, SAML, LDAP, and SCIM across the organization
• Drive cross-team technical alignment on authentication standards, patterns, and best practices across Grafana’s engineering organization
• Represent Grafana Labs at meetups and conferences, and contribute to the broader identity and authentication community
• As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and strong communication skills are essential