Backend Engineer, Grafana Labs

• You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity
• At Grafana, we actively embrace AI-assisted and agentic development practices, integrating these technologies into both our engineering workflows and the systems we deliver
• We encourage our engineers to thoughtfully leverage AI tools to enhance every stage of the lifecycle, from design and implementation to testing, documentation, and operations
• We also look for strategic opportunities to embed agentic capabilities within our services to eliminate toil, bolster reliability, and ensure that complex customer workflows remain resilient and safe
• We are seeking a Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount
• As a remote-first organization, you should be comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones and taking full ownership of the critical systems powering Grafana Cloud
• Our team is small and operates with a high degree of independence; you will be expected to lead major projects, coordinate across service boundaries, and help define the technical direction for our domain
• You will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops
• We value engineers who can take ambiguous lifecycle requirements and transform them into explicit, modular solutions
• You should be adept at breaking down complex systems work into safe, iterative increments while clearly communicating technical tradeoffs to both internal stakeholders and adjacent product teams
• You have at least 1 year of fully remote work experience
• You have some experience working on a SaaS platform and are familiar with common distributed systems concepts (e.g., scalability, multi-tenancy, HA)
• Have professional experience with Golang and be willing to work across both backend service and application code
• Care deeply about developer and user experience and the quality of the products that you work on
• Have some experience contributing to the delivery of projects, from initial brainstorming to shipping a product to the customer
• You write clean, well-tested software that other engineers can understand, operate, and maintain
• Can take on well-defined tasks, break them down, and execute iteratively to deliver working solutions and gather feedback
• You are willing to collaborate across teams and ensure your work is aligned with the needs of other squads and external stakeholders
• Familiarity with Kubernetes in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and exposure to infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and contributing to post-incident reviews

Desirable

• The AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configuration
• Our work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations. We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across grafana.com, Stack State Service (SSS), Hosted Grafana, cloud regions, and the underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure. When this domain works well, customers get reliable stack creation, safe configuration rollout, predictable migrations, and fewer manual operational interventions
• Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend, to track desired stack state, detect and repair drift across stack templates, grafana.com state, Hosted Grafana, and actual customer stack configuration
• Collaborate across SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilient
• Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity (e.g., aiming for single PR regional SSS deployment) and contributing to the Stack Config Reconciliation project
• Manage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configuration
• Support new region and cluster rollouts, including the operational paths required to bring stacks online safely in new Grafana Cloud regions
• Improve incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment, reconciliation failures, plugin rollout issues, and Hosted Grafana integration failures
• Partner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle work
• Contribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operations
• You will help own the production behavior of the systems you build. That includes improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures. You should be comfortable debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacks
• Writing efficient, readable, and easy to maintain code
• Implementing new microservices or systems
• Collaborating with teammates and other departments to reach consensus on proposed solutions
• Coordinating with product and UX when needed
• Responding to customer requests and feedback
• When ready, participating in our follow-the-sun OnCall rotation
• Participating in team decisions, such as roadmap planning and prioritization