Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote

📍 United States

USD 175,000-210,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
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1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI @ 7 AWS Azure Codex @ 4 Communication @ 7 Debugging @ 3 DevOps @ 4 Distributed Systems @ 6 GCP Go @ 3 Grafana @ 4 IaC Kafka @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM Microservices @ 6 Observability @ 3 Prometheus @ 4 Python @ 3 Rust @ 3

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer for the Mimir Query and Databases team. 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 through Grafana. The Databases team owns and operates telemetry databases including Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. These are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operated at scale on Kubernetes across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Responsibilities

Influence the product roadmap and career objectives.
Deliver new features and iterate based on results and customer feedback.
Drive projects from initial concept through production operations.
Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning their reliability, performance, and availability.
Participate in follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of operated services.
Write and review pull requests and design documents.
Shepherd automated release rollouts.
Contribute to open-source projects beyond the immediate team scope.
Support team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate in a fully remote squad.
Develop a deeper understanding of Grafana Cloud, its customers, and a large distributed-system codebase.
Use AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups while maintaining strong code review and quality standards.

Requirements

Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana uses Go; familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages is also relevant.
Experience leading and delivering projects from requirements gathering and ideation through customer delivery.
Experience developing cloud software or working in systems engineering.
Experience with on-call responsibilities and the DevOps model.
Experience writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
Familiarity with observability systems, including the use of metrics, logs, and traces for debugging.
Comfort with microservices architecture and distributed systems.
Experience using LLMs such as Claude and Codex in daily development.
A self-starting, customer-focused, pragmatic, collaborative approach with strong communication and time-management skills.

Bonus Skills

Kubernetes experience.
Experience with queue systems such as the Kafka protocol.
Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in operational, on-call, hobby, or homelab environments.
Familiarity with infrastructure as code.

Compensation

The United States base compensation range is 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.

Benefits

100% remote, global culture.
In-person onboarding.
30 days of annual leave per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days.
Career growth opportunities, transparent communication, and an open-source, high-trust culture.