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 seeking a Staff 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 worked on a big SaaS platform and dealt with common distributed systems problems (e.g. scalability, multi-tenancy, data isolation, 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 with delivering projects from gathering requirements, and brainstorming ideas to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way
• You write clean, robust, well-tested software that other engineers can understand, operate, and maintain
• Have experience with mentoring junior engineers in a collaborative but asynchronous environment
• Can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve tight learning loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively
• You are willing to work across teams. Your work has to be aligned with the needs of other squads and external stakeholders. You make your plans transparent, bring stakeholders on board, and are open to feedback and suggestions
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews

Desirable

• Application Core Services (AppCore) partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams to deliver reliable internal and customer-facing systems that power critical parts of the Grafana business
• We build on the grafana.com platform to create custom solutions and integrations across the many systems that support a modern software company
• The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly
• AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains
• Our work includes maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation, automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract, integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts
• This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations
• The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales
• We are looking for engineers who enjoy solving complex workflow and systems problems, improving reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders
• 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
• Of course, there is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously
• As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day
• You will work closely with counterparts in other regions to provide balanced coverage and shared ownership
• Some things you might be expected to do could include:
• Writing efficient, readable, and easy to maintain code
• Designing 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