Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

Join the Grafana Cloud Databases team as a Staff Backend Engineer to build and operate highly scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to open-source projects and deliver critical observability services to thousands of companies globally.

Responsibilities

• Drive the design, development, and operation of critical distributed systems for Grafana Cloud's observability databases (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope).
• Influence roadmap, deliver new features, and iterate based on customer feedback.
• Own the reliability, performance, and availability of services, including participation in on-call rotations.
• Mentor team members, contribute to design discussions, and foster an open-source culture.

Requirements

• Solid experience with a programming language like Go, Python, C, C++, or Rust.
• Proven ability to drive projects from conception to delivery in a self-driven manner.
• Experience developing software for cloud environments or strong systems engineering background.
• Experience running complex distributed systems at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to write clean, robust, and performant software.
• Strong problem-solving skills, customer focus, and pragmatic approach to complex challenges.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills in a remote-first environment.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Kubernetes.
• Experience running Kafka at scale.
• Familiarity with Grafana and Prometheus in operational or SRE contexts.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Understanding of infrastructure as code principles.

About the Team

The Databases team is responsible for the core telemetry databases (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope) that power Grafana Cloud and on-premise solutions. These are open-source, multi-tenant distributed systems built in Go, running on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). The team also contributes to related projects like Prometheus, Grafana Agent, and OpenTelemetry, fostering a collaborative, remote-first, and open-source culture.