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 opportunity and we would be interested in applicants based in Spain, Ireland, Germany, the UK or Sweden at this time.
Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Loki Query | EMEA | Remote
The Opportunity:
Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. 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 Databases team owns the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics , Loki for logs , Tempo for traces , and Pyroscope for profiles . Our databases are OSS projects that we also offer as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud, and as an on-premise solution. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and running on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). We also have engineers working on Prometheus , Grafana Agent , Mimir proxies , and OpenTelemetry.
As a company we are remote-first 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 tech stack is mostly made up of services written in Go, running on multiple Kubernetes clusters that leverage Cloud object storage.
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 the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
What You’ll Be Doing:
Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.
Drive projects from initial ideation all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
Be a part of your team’s on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
Supporting other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system
As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
You are customer focused. 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
Requirements:
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
Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
Bonus Points For:
Experience working with Kubernetes and/or Docker
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 and distributed systems, and a desire to learn
Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code
Compensation & Rewards:
In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is £91,000 - £114,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here .
*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.
Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:
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. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.
Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religi