Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases

Details

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for the Adaptive Telemetry group within the Databases department. This is a remote position for candidates located in USA time zones.

Grafana Cloud is a composable observability platform integrating metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. The Databases department owns and operates the telemetry databases Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles, offering them as cloud services.

The Adaptive Telemetry group develops Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces, and Adaptive Profiles. These solutions help users control and optimize telemetry data so that storage is optimized according to usage patterns and only the most valuable data is retained.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap by defining architectural vision, prioritizing major product and platform improvements, and influencing product and engineering decisions.
• Lead the end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects, including planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation.
• Own architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems while balancing scalability, availability, latency, maintainability, and cost.
• Define SLOs and SLIs, lead high-severity incident response, run blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation.
• Improve observability, automation, operational readiness, telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and processes that reduce toil and MTTR.
• Align stakeholders across Product, Design, and engineering teams, negotiate tradeoffs, and remove delivery blockers.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and support sound technical decision-making.
• Represent engineering internally and externally, communicating technical strategy to engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.
• Use AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups within security and code-quality guidelines.

Requirements

• Proven experience delivering and operating large distributed systems spanning multiple teams, with clear technical leadership and impact.
• Strong systems-design skills and understanding of tradeoffs involving latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, microservices, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and operational practices.
• Experience defining SLOs and SLIs, capacity planning, performance tuning, and driving reliability initiatives.
• Excellent coding and technical design skills, with experience writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code.
• Experience with Go is preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages are also applicable.
• Curiosity and practical experience with AI-assisted or agentic development tools.
• Familiarity with streaming or messaging systems such as Kafka and observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana or equivalents.
• Ability to influence without authority, align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Self-starting, action-oriented, and customer-focused approach.

Compensation & Benefits

• United States base compensation range: USD 174,986–209,983 per year.
• Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skill set.
• Benefits include equity, bonus where applicable, and other company benefits.
• 100% remote, global culture.
• In-person onboarding.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days.
• Career growth pathways, transparent communication, empowered teams, and an open-source-driven culture.