Staff Backend Software Engineer - Databases - Loki Ingest

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company that builds observability software used by millions worldwide. The Databases team owns telemetry databases including Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These projects are open source and also offered as Cloud services supporting Grafana Cloud and as on-premise solutions. The databases are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and run on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). The team also works with Prometheus, Grafana Agent, Mimir proxies, and OpenTelemetry.

This is a remote opportunity. Grafana Labs is interested in applicants based in Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, or Sweden at this time.

Responsibilities

• Influence roadmap and own your career objectives.
• Work with the team to deliver new features and iterate based on results.
• Drive projects from ideation through to customer-facing operations.
• Contribute to open-source projects that may be outside your immediate team scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems; own reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of running services.
• Mentor and support team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate across the team.
• Learn new skills by understanding the cloud product and the codebase of a large distributed system.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana primarily uses Go; familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar is considered transferable.
• Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, brainstorming, and shipping to customers in a self-driven way.
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering.
• Experience writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
• Good communication skills and an independent attitude suitable for a largely remote engineering organization.

Bonus Points

• Experience working with Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Experience as a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including being on-call) or hobby/homelab usage.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems and a desire to learn more.
• Familiarity with being on-call, performing operations/SRE tasks, or with the concept of infrastructure as code.

Compensation & Rewards

• In the United Kingdom, the base compensation range for this role is GBP 100,000 - GBP 121,000.
• Actual compensation may vary by level, experience, and skillset. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Compensation ranges are country specific; recruiters will discuss local pay ranges if applying from other locations.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs / Benefits

• 100% remote, global culture.
• Opportunity to work in a scaling organization on meaningful problems.
• Transparent communication and company-wide updates.
• Innovation-driven environment with autonomy to ship and experiment.
• Strong open-source roots and community-driven values.
• Empowered teams with a high-trust, low-ego culture.
• Career growth pathways and approachable leadership.
• In-person onboarding to help new hires integrate.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum (with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days); local legislation will be complied with where applicable.

Equal Opportunity & Recruitment Notes

• Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer.
• Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in recruitment to assist matching CVs to job postings; recruitment team will continue manual review of inbound CVs.
• For candidate privacy practices, see the Grafana applicant and candidate privacy policy.