Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring for a Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases role. This is a remote position for candidates in USA time zones.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives.
• Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable.
• Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence.
• Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR.
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives.
• Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs.
• Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning.

Grafana Labs invests heavily in developer productivity and encourages AI-assisted development (within security guidelines), including prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups.

Requirements

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems across multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
• Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost.
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and operational practices that keep them healthy.
• Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
• Excellent coding and design skills. Write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and lead technical designs. They use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. Curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools; practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow is ideal.
• Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
• Influence without authority. Align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding (to learn what they do and how they do it)
• Balance is Key: global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days