Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Enterprise | US | Remote

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company building observability software used by millions globally. The Grafana Enterprise team builds composable observability solutions for large-scale operators with security and regulatory requirements. This role focuses on designing and building backend systems that power Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud features, with an emphasis on reliability, scalability, security, and multi-tenancy.

Responsibilities

• Design and lead development of backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise features at scale.
• Architect and implement distributed backend services in Go with a focus on correctness, observability, and performance.
• Design APIs and service contracts used by enterprise operators and cloud service providers (gRPC/protobuf).
• Drive projects from ideation through development lifecycle to production, including owning operational health.
• Participate in weekday 12h x 5d and separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations to maintain platform health.
• Collaborate with Product, UX, and frontend engineers to deliver end-to-end solutions.
• Engage directly with large enterprise customers and cloud providers to translate requirements into engineering solutions.
• Hire and mentor engineers and drive continuous improvement of engineering and operational practices.
• Advocate for customers and contribute to open source communities.

Requirements

• Strong professional experience writing production services through to production operations at scale.
• Deep distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, and trade-offs at scale.
• Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems for large-scale, high-traffic, high-availability, or multi-tenant environments (infrastructure, observability, or software delivery platforms preferred).
• Professional experience building and consuming gRPC/protobuf APIs and designing clean service contracts across service boundaries.
• Strong database skills (PostgreSQL and/or MySQL): 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 for large organisations or external operators.
• 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.
• Excellent written and interpersonal communication skills; comfortable working remotely and collaborating across time zones.

Nice to Have

• Experience with TypeScript and React to contribute to or collaborate on frontend features.
• 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 SLAs.
• Experience designing or operating large-scale build infrastructure, artifact registries, distributed build caches, hermetic build systems (e.g., Bazel), or developer platform tooling.

Compensation and Benefits

• United States compensation range: $174,986 - $209,983 USD (country-specific ranges apply for other locations).
• All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• 30 days per annum global annual leave policy; 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days (subject to local legislation).
• Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants and access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro) to improve developer productivity.
• In-person onboarding to support successful integration from day one.

Work Location and Schedule

• This is a remote position. Grafana Labs is remote-first/global. For this posting, candidates in the United States and Canada are being considered.
• Meetings tend to happen between 14:00 and 17:00 UTC. The role requires participation in on-call rotations as noted above.

Company Culture

• Remote-only, open-source roots, transparent communication, high-trust culture, and focus on scaling and developer autonomy. Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and may use AI tools in recruitment to assist in matching CVs to job postings.