Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, committed to open source and innovation. They are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to lead technical strategy, oversee large projects, and ensure the reliability and performance of their telemetry databases.
Responsibilities
- Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions
- Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives
- Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable
- Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence
- Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR
- Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives
- Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs
- Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning
Skills
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
- Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
- Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
- Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
- Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
- Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team's workflow
- Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents)
- Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
- Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus (if applicable)
- 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.
- Balance is Key - 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. 1We will comply with local legislation where applicable.
Company Overview