Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Second Horizon

Details

Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context, including data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge. The system retrieves context while agents make decisions and data teams maintain the intelligence.

This role will help build the first production services for the context layer management system. The Staff Backend Engineer will design and ship the backend architecture for ingestion, context storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. This is an early-stage, high-autonomy role requiring comfort with ambiguity, pragmatic architectural decision-making, and evolving systems from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and operate backend services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration.
• Define and build a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Build APIs and service interfaces that enable AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Partner across product and infrastructure to balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards, and use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Contribute to the technical direction of the product, including architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.
• Communicate effectively and contribute across teams in a dynamic, collaborative environment.
• Take ownership of AI solutions, ensuring they are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

Requirements

• Strong experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• Ability to tackle complex engineering problems and make decisions with minimal supervision.
• Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, with a practical focus on delivering high-quality solutions.
• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by generative AI.
• Proven track record of delivering software that reached production and is actively used by customers or users.
• Experience working in cloud-native environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.
• Ability to iterate quickly, release prototypes, collect feedback, and refine solutions pragmatically.
• Proven initiative, ownership, and ability to define scope in ambiguous situations.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

Bonus Points

• Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
• Experience as a data analyst or working with data platforms such as Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Snowflake, or Databricks.
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

Work Environment

This is a remote opportunity for applicants located in Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland, or Germany. Grafana Labs is a remote-first company that works primarily asynchronously and in writing, with regular video meetings. In-person onboarding is provided.

Benefits

• Equity and bonus, if applicable.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days.
• Remote-first global culture.
• Career growth pathways.
• In-person onboarding.

Compensation

In Sweden, the base compensation range is SEK 878,578–SEK 1,054,294 per year. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skill set.