Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

Join the Databases team at Grafana Labs and help build the core telemetry storage for Grafana Cloud. This role involves developing and maintaining open-source distributed systems for metrics, logs, and traces. You will contribute to a platform trusted by millions of users worldwide.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Help shape the product roadmap and your personal career goals.
• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features and refine them based on results.
• Manage projects from initial concept through to operational deployment and customer use.
• Contribute to open-source projects beyond your immediate team's focus.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, ensuring their reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations for your team's services.
• Mentor team members, engage in design discussions, and work collaboratively.
• Deepen your understanding of the cloud product, customer needs, and the large distributed system codebase.

Requirements

• Proven experience with at least one programming language (Go, Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar).
• Experience independently delivering projects from requirements gathering to product shipment.
• Experience developing software for cloud environments or with systems engineering.
• Ability to write clear, stable, and efficient software that is easy for others to maintain.

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes or Docker.
• Prior operational use of Grafana and Prometheus (e.g., on-call, hobby projects).
• Familiarity with microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience with on-call duties, SRE tasks, or infrastructure as code concepts.

Skills & tools

• Go
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• Mimir
• Loki
• Tempo
• Pyroscope
• Grafana Agent
• OpenTelemetry
• GCP, Azure, AWS (Cloud object storage)
• AI coding assistants (GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro)

Practical notes

Base compensation for this role in the UK is £91,000 - £114,000, with actual pay varying by experience and skillset. Benefits include equity and a bonus (if applicable). Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with a global team. New hires participate in an in-person onboarding program. The company offers 30 days of annual leave, including 3 designated "Grafana Shutdown Days" for collective disconnection.