Staff Software Engineer - Platform, Application Core Services

Details

Overview

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform built for scale.

This is a remote opportunity. Applicants must be located in USA time zones (EST + CST only at this time).

Role

Application Core Services (AppCore) builds the control plane behind Grafana Cloud, designing the systems that create, configure, and operate thousands of customer environments safely and reliably.

Working at the intersection of product, platform, and operations, the team develops the services that power critical customer and internal workflows, from provisioning and cloud marketplace integrations to billing and customer lifecycle management.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Design and build distributed backend systems that keep customer stack state consistent across Grafana Cloud.
• Develop reconciliation and automation workflows that improve reliability, reduce operational complexity, and safely manage infrastructure changes.
• Lead technical initiatives spanning multiple services and partner closely with Product, Infrastructure, Hosted Grafana, and adjacent platform teams.
• Improve deployment workflows, regional expansion, rollout safety, and incident recovery across thousands of customer environments.
• Own the production systems you build, including observability, operational tooling, on-call, and continuous reliability improvements.
• Participate in a global follow-the-sun on-call rotation, with investment in AI-assisted development using modern coding tools and frontier models.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Experience building and operating large-scale SaaS or cloud platforms.
• Strong backend engineering experience in Go or another systems language; comfortable learning new technologies.
• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Enjoy solving problems around distributed systems, eventual consistency, stateful services, and system reliability.
• Ability to independently lead projects, navigate ambiguity, and influence technical direction across teams.
• Care about writing clean, maintainable software and improving the developer experience.
• Experience participating in production operations, incident response, and on-call.
• Comfortable working in a remote-first, highly collaborative environment.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with Kubernetes operators, reconcilers, or control plane development.
• Experience with Go and TypeScript/Node.js.
• Experience with Terraform, Flux, Argo, Jsonnet, Tanka, or similar infrastructure tooling.
• Experience with SaaS provisioning, customer lifecycle systems, or multi-tenant platforms.
• Experience solving problems related to configuration drift, partial failures, or cross-service consistency.

Compensation & Rewards

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 174,986 - USD 209,983. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process.

Benefits include equity and bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here: https://grafana.com/about/careers/#jobs.

All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding (for new joiners)
• Balance is Key: global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days

Privacy / Recruitment Notes

Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings; the recruitment team continues to review inbound CVs manually.