Staff Backend Software Engineer - Databases - Loki Ingest

About the Role

Join our Databases team as a Staff Backend Software Engineer, focusing on Loki Ingest, to build and maintain the core telemetry databases that power Grafana Cloud. This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to open-source observability projects and deliver scalable, multi-tenant distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Influence the team's roadmap and drive projects from ideation through to operations and customer delivery.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, ensuring their reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you run.
• Mentor and support team members, actively participating in design discussions and fostering collaboration.
• Embrace our open-source culture by contributing to projects within and beyond your team's direct scope.
• Continuously learn and gain a deeper understanding of our cloud product, customers, and large distributed system codebase.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar are also valuable).
• Proven experience delivering software projects from requirements gathering to customer deployment in a self-driven manner.
• Experience developing software for cloud environments or strong systems engineering background.
• Ability to write clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained.
• Motivated self-starter with a customer-focused mindset and pragmatic approach to problem-solving.
• Excellent communication skills and an independent attitude for remote collaboration.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Familiarity with Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles, including on-call experience.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Understanding of infrastructure as code concepts.

About the Team

The Databases team is responsible for Grafana's core telemetry databases: Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These are open-source, multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go, running on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). We also contribute to Prometheus, Grafana Agent, and OpenTelemetry, operating in a remote-first, global environment that values diverse perspectives.