The role
From Grafana Labs's own posting.
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X .
We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the US and Canada.
The Opportunity:
Grafana Enterprise is our composable observability platform focused on large-scale operators with security and regulatory requirements who need to self-operate their observability solutions. Grafana Enterprise features are also part of our Grafana Cloud service. Grafana Cloud is an integrated suite of observability applications offered as a service. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software, including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo, without the overhead of installing, maintaining, and scaling their own observability stack.
The Grafana Enterprise team is a diverse team of expert technologists working remotely from around the globe. The team focuses on innovative solutions to large-scale customer challenges and developing solutions that improve security, robustness, flexibility, multitenancy, and interoperability on behalf of our customers. We work across the larger Grafana Labs organisation and directly with external customers, including major cloud service providers and global enterprises running observability and build infrastructure at massive scale, to solve their most demanding distributed systems challenges. Our customers include software engineers, site reliability engineers, and platform operators at medium, large, and global enterprises.
As a company we are remote-only and global; we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software. Our meetings tend to happen between 14:00 and 17:00 UTC, but we are flexible and responsive to the needs of our engineers and our customers. We measure ourselves by our openness, helpfulness, and our shared successes.
We are looking for experienced software engineers who are passionate about distributed systems and building reliable, scalable backend infrastructure to join our growing team. Our backend is Go, and we build tools for people operating some of the world's largest observability and software delivery stacks. Backend Engineers at Grafana also contribute to open source communities.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Earning the trust of our large-scale operator customers to further Grafana's "big tent" philosophy of data accessibility and to meet clear business objectives
Designing and leading the development of backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise features at scale
Driving continuous improvement of our engineering culture through words and actions
Driving projects from initial ideation through the development lifecycle to production
Contributing to the scalability, reliability, security, and multi-tenancy of the Grafana platform trusted by some of the world's largest operators
Owning the operational health of our platform by participating in weekday 12h x 5d and separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations. (Yes, we prioritize ops load reduction.)
Hiring and developing the best engineers to build the future of Grafana
Developing your skills as a thought leader to drive continuous improvement of engineering and operational practices across Grafana Labs
As we are remote-first, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so strong teamwork and excellent written and interpersonal communication skills are a must.
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.
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).
What Makes You a Great Fit:
You work well as a communicative member of a team of engineering professionals.
You earn trust by saying what you mean and doing what you say.
You are customer focused and especially attuned to the needs of large-scale operators who rely on Grafana as critical infrastructure. You start with their needs and work backwards.
You insist on the highest standards and work to develop the skills and knowledge of your fellow team members.
You take on complex distributed systems challenges, break them down into digestible problems, and leverage your team and organization to deliver.
You design modular solutions, deliver minimum loveable products, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively.
What will you be doing? (Role specifics)
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will design and build the backend systems powering Grafana Enterprise — the platform trusted by the world's largest operators to run their observability and software delivery infrastructure.
Hiring and developing the best engineers we can to deliver the future of Observability.
Architecting and implementing distributed backend services in Go, with a focus on correctness, observability, and performance at scale
Designing APIs and service contracts used by thousands of enterprise operators and cloud service providers
Collaborating with Product and UX to shape features and partnering with frontend engineers to ship complete, end-to-end solutions
Driving scalability and reliability improvements that matter to large-scale operators running Grafana in regulated, high-availability environments
Engaging directly with large enterprise customers and cloud service providers to understand their requirements and translate them into robust engineering solutions
Advocating for our customers at every stage of the development lifecycle
What technical competencies are we looking for?
Deep professional experience writing production services, from ideation through to production operations at scale
Strong distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, and the trade-offs that come with operating at scale
Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems for large-scale, high-traffic, high-availability, or multi-tenant environments, ideally in the context of infrastructure, observability, or software delivery platforms
Professional experience building and consuming gRPC/protobuf APIs and designing clean service contracts across service boundaries
Strong database skills, such as PostgreSQL and/or MySQL; including schema design, query optimisation, and schema migrations at scale
Experience with large-scale CI/CD systems and build tooling, designing, operatin