Staff Backend Engineer

About the Role

Join our innovative team as a Staff Backend Engineer to build and operate critical observability databases like Mimir, Loki, and Tempo, powering Grafana Cloud and thousands of companies globally. This is a career-defining opportunity to contribute to open-source projects within a remote-first, collaborative environment.

Responsibilities

• Take an active role in influencing the product roadmap and your own career objectives.
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use results to iterate and improve.
• Drive projects from initial ideation all the way to operations once in the hands of customers.
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to projects beyond your immediate team’s scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning their reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running.
• Mentor and support other team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate effectively.
• Gain a deeper understanding of our cloud product, customers, and the codebase of large distributed systems.

Requirements

• Motivated self-starter with a bias towards action and a customer-focused mindset.
• Pragmatic approach to complex challenges, breaking them down for short feedback loops and iterative delivery.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, essential for a fully remote setup.
• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go, Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar).
• Experience delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product in a self-driven way.
• Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud OR experience with systems engineering.
• Experience running complex distributed systems at scale.
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with Kubernetes.
• Experience running Kafka at scale.
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call) or on hobby/homelab projects.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn.
• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code.