Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Loki Ingest

at Grafana Labs
📍 United States
USD 168,300-201,900 per year
SENIOR
✅ Remote

SCRAPED

Used Tools & Technologies

Not specified

Required Skills & Competences ?

Go @ 4 Grafana @ 4 Kafka @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 Prometheus @ 4 Python @ 3 GCP @ 4 Distributed Systems @ 4 Leadership @ 4 AWS @ 4 Azure @ 4 Communication @ 7 SRE @ 3 Rust @ 3 Microservices @ 4 OpenTelemetry @ 4

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company powering observability for more than 20M users worldwide. The Databases team owns telemetry databases including Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and run on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). The team contributes to open-source projects and supports Grafana Cloud and on-premise deployments.

This role is a remote opportunity for applicants in USA time zones only.

Responsibilities

  • Influence the roadmap and define your own career objectives.
  • Work with the team to deliver new features, iterate based on results, and improve systems.
  • Drive projects from ideation through to production and operations.
  • Contribute to open-source projects beyond your immediate team responsibilities.
  • Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning reliability, performance, and availability.
  • Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you run.
  • Mentor and support other engineers, participate in design discussions, and collaborate cross-functionally.
  • Learn and deepen understanding of the cloud product and large distributed system codebases.

Requirements

  • Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana Labs primarily uses Go; familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar is also valuable.
  • Experience delivering projects end-to-end (requirements → design → shipping to customers) in a self-driven manner.
  • Some experience developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience in systems engineering.
  • Some experience running complex distributed systems at scale.
  • Experience writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
  • Strong communication skills and the ability to work independently in a remote environment.

Bonus / Nice-to-Have

  • Experience working with Kubernetes.
  • Experience running Kafka at scale.
  • Being a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational/on-call roles (or hobby/homelab experience).
  • Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn them.
  • Familiarity with on-call operations/SRE tasks and infrastructure as code.
  • Experience with Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, and OpenTelemetry is advantageous.

Compensation & Rewards

  • United States base compensation range: USD 168,256 - USD 201,907 (actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset).
  • All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Additional benefits and possible bonus are listed on the company careers page.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

  • Remote-first, global culture with transparent communication and approachable leadership.
  • Opportunities to work on high-impact, open-source projects and to grow your career.
  • In-person onboarding and a global annual leave policy (30 days per annum with 3 reserved shutdown days; local legislation applies).

Other

  • Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer.
  • The company may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist with CV matching; human review remains part of the process.