Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer focused on databases. In this role, you will collaborate with the team to implement distributed systems for managing profile ingestion and queries, while also leading projects and mentoring team members.
Responsibilities
- Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and make improvements
- Lead projects from concept to implementation, including ongoing customer support
- Design, build, operate, and maintain essential systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability
- Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
- Participate in on-call rotations and take responsibility for the services you oversee
- Support and mentor team members, engage in design conversations, and work closely with colleagues
- Expand your skill set by deepening your knowledge of our cloud products, understanding our customers, and learning about our codebase
Skills
- You are a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action
- We build everything with our users in mind
- You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs
- Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively
- Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You'll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must
- Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar, then that translates well
- Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer's hands in a self-driven way
- Strong experience with designing and developing software that runs in the Cloud *or* experience with systems engineering
- Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
- Experience with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code
- Solid experience with distributed systems
- Experience working with Kubernetes
- Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
- Exposure to microservices architecture
- Databases backend experience
Benefits
- All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success.
- We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.
- You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
- 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
- Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
- Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
- Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
- We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. **We will comply with local legislation where applicable.**
Company Overview