Staff 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
• We are looking for experienced software engineers who are passionate about distributed systems and building reliable, scalable backend infrastructure to join our growing team
• You work well as a communicative member of a team of engineering professionals
• You earn trust by saying what you mean and doing what you say
• You are customer focused and especially attuned to the needs of large-scale operators who rely on Grafana as critical infrastructure. You start with their needs and work backwards
• You insist on the highest standards and work to develop the skills and knowledge of your fellow team members
• You take on complex distributed systems challenges, break them down into digestible problems, and leverage your team and organization to deliver
• You design modular solutions, deliver minimum loveable products, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively
• Deep professional experience writing production services, from ideation through to production operations at scale
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, and the trade-offs that come with operating at scale
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems for large-scale, high-traffic, high-availability, or multi-tenant environments, ideally in the context of infrastructure, observability, or software delivery platforms
• Professional experience building and consuming gRPC/protobuf APIs and designing clean service contracts across service boundaries
• Strong database skills, such as PostgreSQL and/or MySQL; including schema design, query optimisation, and schema migrations at scale
• Experience with large-scale CI/CD systems and build tooling, designing, operating, or integrating with continuous delivery pipelines that serve large engineering organisations or external operators at scale
• Comfort working with Kubernetes and containerised deployment environments, including patterns for operating stateful workloads and multi-tenant clusters
• Experience with observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing
• Familiarity with dependency injection patterns (e.g., Google Wire) and clean, testable service architecture

Desirable

• Our backend is Go, and we build tools for people operating some of the world's largest observability and software delivery stacks. Backend Engineers at Grafana also contribute to open source communities
• Earning the trust of our large-scale operator customers to further Grafana's "big tent" philosophy of data accessibility and to meet clear business objectives
• Designing and leading the development of backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise features at scale
• Driving continuous improvement of our engineering culture through words and actions
• Driving projects from initial ideation through the development lifecycle to production
• Contributing to the scalability, reliability, security, and multi-tenancy of the Grafana platform trusted by some of the world's largest operators
• Owning the operational health of our platform by participating in weekday 12h x 5d and separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations. (Yes, we prioritize ops load reduction.)
• Hiring and developing the best engineers to build the future of Grafana
• Developing your skills as a thought leader to drive continuous improvement of engineering and operational practices across Grafana Labs
• As we are remote-first, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so strong teamwork and excellent written and interpersonal communication skills are a must
• 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 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro)
• As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will design and build the backend systems powering Grafana Enterprise — the platform trusted by the world's largest operators to run their observability and software delivery infrastructure
• Hiring and developing the best engineers we can to deliver the future of Observability
• Architecting and implementing distributed backend services in Go, with a focus on correctness, observability, and performance at scale
• Designing APIs and service contracts used by thousands of enterprise operators and cloud service providers
• Collaborating with Product and UX to shape features and partnering with frontend engineers to ship complete, end-to-end solutions
• Driving scalability and reliability improvements that matter to large-scale operators running Grafana in regulated, high-availability environments
• Engaging directly with large enterprise customers and cloud service providers to understand their requirements and translate them into robust engineering solutions
• Advocating for our customers at every stage of the development lifecycle