Staff Backend Engineer, Grafana Labs

• Strong 8+ years of experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but do not require candidates with Go experience. Long term experience in any major language (Python, .NET, Java, Rust, etc) with a willingness to learn Go is acceptable
• Experience with cloud-based software development and production systems
• Experience writing clean, maintainable, robust, and performant software
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry)
• Experience with delivering projects from start to finish in a self-driven manner
• Experience in a hands-on technical leadership role, setting technical direction and leading project teams
• Experience with microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
• Strong mentoring and leadership skills
• Experience participating in an on-call rotation and incident management
• You have a passion for observability and like to share your knowledge by writing documentation and blog posts
• You love to engage with customers and help them out
• You have excellent communication skills
• You have relevant open source experience, ideally in the observability domain
• You are willing to become an active member of the OpenTelemetry and Prometheus communities
• You’re curious and you enjoy learning new programming languages and frameworks, setting up examples, and figuring out how things work
• You have a good understanding of typical production environments. Ideally you have been responsible for operating production services and organizing on-call
• You actively mentor other team members, identifying areas for focus and improvement

Desirable

• The Observability department is focused on enabling developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure in any environment by providing tools to instrument their code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud and visualize and explore it
• In this role, you will be part of the team that builds our Cloud Observability stack that allows customers to collect and visualize metrics from various systems and applications
• We build and maintain the backend of opinionated apps such as Cloud Provider O11y, Database O11y, and K8s Monitoring
• This includes the dashboards, alerts, documentation, and infrastructure while working closely with other teams to ensure seamless experiences
• We also strive to incorporate OSS contributions in our work by continuing to augment projects like Alloy, Prometheus, Open Telemetry, and Beyla
• The Observability department provides a core building block for customers using Grafana Cloud, and contributes significantly to our user value
• 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 unique perspective to the software
• We are looking for Engineers that are passionate about communicating with data and providing seamless experiences for our customers to join our growing team
• Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities
• At Grafana Labs, ICs have a dedicated career path and do not have to become managers to progress in their career
• Staff Software Engineers at Grafana have a large amount of experience across multiple areas
• They are able to estimate, plan, coordinate and deliver large tasks spanning multiple systems
• They actively coach and mentor other team members in their team and are able to identify and resolve issues with technology and product processes
• You will bring your software engineering expertise to develop and maintain our portfolio of opinionated observability apps such as our Cloud Provider Observability solution, working to develop, maintain and scale our infrastructure observability features in Grafana Cloud
• At Grafana Labs, we define senior roles via the scope of their business impact more than via their expertise or their specific activities
• So the most important thing we are looking for in an engineer is the ability to take ownership
• You will need to drive technical implementations working with the upstream community and contribute to business conversations, helping shape the long-term strategy