Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to design and build the backend systems for Grafana Enterprise. The role involves collaborating with a diverse team to develop innovative solutions that enhance the platform's scalability, reliability, and security for large-scale operators.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
Skills
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Experience with TypeScript and React for contributing to frontend features and collaborating closely with frontend engineers
- Experience with Grafana's LGTM+ observability stack (Loki, Mimir, Tempo, Pyroscope, Alloy)
- Prior experience at or building for large-scale cloud service providers, IaaS providers, or global enterprises with demanding SLA requirements
- Experience designing or operating large-scale build infrastructure artifact registries, distributed build caches, hermetic build systems (e.g., Bazel), or developer platform tooling
Benefits
- All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success.
- 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.
- You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).
- 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
- Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
- Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
- Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
- We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect.
- We will comply with local legislation where applicable.
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship