Senior Backend Engineer

About the role

Join the Databases team at Grafana Labs to build and maintain the core telemetry databases that power Grafana Cloud. This role involves developing open-source distributed systems in Go, running on Kubernetes across major cloud providers. You will contribute to projects like Loki, Mimir, and Tempo, ensuring their reliability and scalability.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Help shape the product roadmap and your personal career path.
• Deliver new features with your team, then use feedback to refine and improve them.
• Manage projects from initial concept through to operational deployment for customers.
• Contribute to open-source projects beyond your immediate team's focus.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, ensuring high reliability and performance.
• Participate in on-call rotations for your team's services.
• Support colleagues, engage in design discussions, and collaborate effectively.
• Deepen your understanding of our cloud products, customer needs, and large distributed system codebases.

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 cloud-based software or with systems engineering.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and high-performing software.

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes or Docker.
• Prior use of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles, including on-call duties or personal projects.
• Familiarity with microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience with on-call responsibilities, SRE tasks, or infrastructure as code.

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

This is a remote position open to applicants in Spain, Ireland, Germany, the UK, or Sweden. Compensation includes equity and other benefits. Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members globally. New hires participate in an in-person onboarding program. The annual leave policy provides 30 days, with 3 days reserved for company-wide shutdown days.