Staff Backend Engineer, Grafana Labs
Adaptive Telemetry, Databases
$175-210k
+ Equity
More information about location
Open & composable observability platform
Be an early applicant
Open & composable observability platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$175-210k
+ Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unite data, no matter where it lives, and empower its users to analyze, take action, and make smart decisions.
Role
Who you are
- You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
- You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind
- You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
- Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
- Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
- Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
- Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
- Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow
- Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents)
- Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
- Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- 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
What the job involves
- The Adaptive Telemetry group, part of the Databases department, has the mission of ensuring that all telemetry stored in our databases is worthy of attention. Under that mission, the group is responsible for the development of Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces and Adaptive Profiles
- Our Adaptive Telemetry solutions give users the ability to control and optimize their telemetry data. These solutions ensure that data storage is optimized based on individual usage patterns, so only the most valuable data is retained
- As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software
- Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions
- Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives
- Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable
- Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence
- Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR
- Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives
- Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs
- Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning
- We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction
- We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards
- You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro)
Our take
Observability plays a crucial role in software development, where dashboards are pivotal for monitoring the health of IT infrastructure across an organization. However, for developers, the frustration of spending unnecessary time navigating between different dashboards to find the latest information detracts from valuable programming time.
Grafana creates customizable observability platforms for its clients, to enhance the efficiency of this process. Its offerings include cloud-based data structures, dashboards, API plugins, and collaboration tools. The company boasts over 25 million users globally, with a customer base exceeding 5,000 and including prominent names like Bloomberg, PJ Morgan Chase, eBay, PayPal and Sony.
While Grafana provides free plans with a simplified tool package, the Grafana Enterprise Stack offers customized solutions on a monthly subscription. The company's continues to improve to meet the evolving needs of its users, enhancing functionality with each iteration. It also fosters community engagement by enabling users to share their Grafana dashboards with the broader open-source community.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
49% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Aug 2024
$270m
SERIES D
Apr 2022
$240m
SERIES D
Total funding: $805.2m
Company benefits
- Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
- Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
- Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
- Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
- Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
- Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
- Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
- Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption
- Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
Company HQ
Financial District, New York, NY
Leadership
Raj Dutt
(CEO & Co-Founder)Currently a Board Member at NSONE. Previously founded Voxel where they served as the CEO for 12 years. They also served as the Senior Vice President of Technology at Internap Network Services.
Torkel Ödegaard
(Co-Founder)Graduated from Mälardalen University with a Master's in Computer Science. Founder of Coding Instinct. Previously worked as a Consultant at H&M, Avega, and Ebay.
Anthony Wood
(Co-Founder)Previously worked at Visa and Voxel as a Senior Systems Engineer. They also have Systems Engineering experience at PalVision and iiNet.
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