Staff Software Engineer - Platform, Application Core Services | USA | Remote

at Grafana Labs

📍 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 Distributed Systems @ 4 Go @ 7 Grafana Kubernetes @ 4 Node.js @ 4 Observability Terraform @ 4 TypeScript @ 4

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to help build and operate the control plane behind Grafana Cloud. The Application Core Services team develops systems for provisioning, configuration, reconciliation, migration, and operation of thousands of customer environments.

This is a remote opportunity for applicants located in USA time zones, currently limited to EST and CST.

Responsibilities

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 collaborate 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 production systems, including observability, operational tooling, on-call, and continuous reliability improvements.
Participate in a global follow-the-sun on-call rotation.
Contribute to developer productivity through pragmatic AI-assisted development, including prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups.

Requirements

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

Bonus Qualifications

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 configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service consistency problems.