Staff Backend Engineer

Details

Grafana Labs is building observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems. This role is for a Staff-level Backend Engineer to help build the first production services for an AI-native data intelligence system that provides governed enterprise context to AI agents.

The context layer management system retrieves the right data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge so agent builders do not have to maintain brittle context files.

This is a remote opportunity and we are looking for candidates from the U.S. or Canada. Residents of Quebec are not eligible for this role. Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company.

Responsibilities

• Build the core backend services: design, implement, test, and operate the first services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: build APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Work across product and infrastructure: partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Operate what you build: instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards; use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Contribute to technical direction: help shape architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area.
• Effective communication: work in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment and communicate effectively across teams.
• Ownership and impact: take full ownership of the AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

Requirements

• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI.
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Nice to have

• Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
• Experience as a data analyst or work with data platforms (e.g., Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, Snowflake, DataBricks).
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus (if applicable)
• Other benefits listed in the posted careers page: https://grafana.com/about/careers/#jobs

Additional notes include:

• 100% remote, global culture
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days (with compliance to local legislation where applicable).