Staff Backend Engineer, Grafana Labs

• 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 good communication skills are a must
• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action. You are community focused. You have a passion for observability and creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs
• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively
• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Your impact on the observability landscape will be noticeable. Good communication skills are a must
• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well
• Some experience with delivering open-source projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the user’s hands in a self-driven way
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
• Some experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem

Desirable

• The Databases Upstream squad's mission is to contribute to the open-source Prometheus and OpenTelemetry projects to further refine Prometheus (and by extension Mimir) as a best-in-class time series database
• We also develop tools and proxies for onboarding customers into Grafana Cloud Metrics from other observability ecosystems
• A Databases Upstream engineer has various work streams
• They likely are engaged in a larger open-source project with other engineers, as well as mixing in some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production
• They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad and the community, and participating in the on-call rotation for diverse ingestion paths
• Maintain and contribute to open-source projects like Prometheus, Mimir, and OpenTelemetry, to drive improvements in Grafana Cloud Metrics
• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve
• Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system
• Sometimes meet with customers to discuss new features or support cases