Staff Backend Software Engineer

About the Role

Join our Databases team as a Staff Backend Software Engineer to build and maintain the core telemetry databases for Grafana Cloud, empowering users with scalable open-source observability solutions. This is a career-defining opportunity to contribute to critical open-source projects like Loki, Mimir, and Tempo within a remote-first, global team.

Responsibilities

• Influence roadmap direction and personal career objectives.
• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features and iterate based on results.
• Drive projects from initial ideation through to operational deployment and customer hands.
• Contribute to open-source projects, even those outside your direct team's scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of running services.
• Mentor team members, engage in design discussions, and foster collaboration.
• Continuously learn about our cloud product, customers, and large distributed system codebase.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go, Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar).
• Proven experience delivering self-driven projects from requirements gathering to product shipment.
• Experience developing software for the Cloud OR experience with systems engineering.
• Track record of writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained.
• Motivated self-starter with a bias towards action.
• Customer-focused with a passion for creating intuitive products.
• Pragmatic approach to breaking down complex challenges, building modular solutions, and iterating.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, essential for a fully remote setup.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience working with Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Prior experience as a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call).
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Familiarity with on-call duties, SRE tasks, or infrastructure as code concepts.

About the Team

The Databases team is responsible for the telemetry databases powering Grafana Cloud, including Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. These are open-source, multi-tenant distributed systems built in Go, running on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). We also contribute to Prometheus, Grafana Agent, Mimir proxies, and OpenTelemetry. Our tech stack primarily consists of Go services on Kubernetes, leveraging cloud object storage.