Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng | USA | Remote

📍 United States

USD 175,000-210,000 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

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 @ 6 Communication @ 7 Distributed Systems @ 4 Go @ 4 Grafana IaC Kubernetes @ 4 Leadership @ 4 Microservices @ 4 Python @ 4 Rust @ 4 Security Technical Leadership @ 4 Terraform @ 4

Details

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer for its Platform SysEng squad. Grafana Cloud processes millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second through a highly available, low-latency stack. The Internal Engineering Platform provides application engineers with the tools, systems, and Kubernetes clusters required to build, deploy, and operate workloads.

This remote opportunity is intended for applicants located in United States time zones, with EST and CST highly preferred. The role includes participation in on-call rotations.

Responsibilities

Work across engineering to improve the maturity and scalability of the platform.
Reduce new region build timelines to meet customer demands.
Design, build, deploy, and operate complex distributed systems.
Own the full lifecycle of software, including design documentation, development, developer feedback, integration testing, and production operations.
Define and improve reliability and performance through SLOs, SLIs, capacity planning, and performance tuning.
Lead technical designs and influence cross-functional stakeholders in a remote-first environment.
Use and contribute to platform infrastructure supporting Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, and other tools.
Participate in on-call rotations to maintain system health.
Use AI-assisted development tools for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups, subject to security and code-quality standards.

Requirements

Proven experience delivering large distributed systems across multiple teams, with evidence of technical leadership and impact.
Demonstrable system design experience and a deep understanding of tradeoffs involving latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, including microservices, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and operational practices.
Experience owning reliability and performance, including defining SLOs and SLIs, capacity planning, performance tuning, and end-to-end reliability initiatives.
Excellent coding and design skills, with experience writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code and leading technical designs.
Experience with Go; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages are also relevant.
Comfort using AI-powered developer tools and, ideally, incorporating them into team workflows.
Ability to influence without authority, align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes.
Strong written and verbal communication skills for working with engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Collaborative, respectful, and consensus-oriented approach suited to a remote-first company.

Bonus Qualifications

Experience with open-source or community-based projects.
Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and Karpenter.
Experience with Terraform and/or Crossplane.
Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet.

Compensation And Benefits

United States base compensation range: USD 174,986–209,983 per year.
Compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skill set.
Equity, bonus where applicable, and other company benefits.
Restricted Stock Units for all roles.
Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants.
100% remote work and a global culture.
In-person onboarding.
Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days where applicable.
Career growth opportunities, transparent communication, and an open-source-oriented culture.