Staff Backend Software Engineer - Databases

About the Role

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Software Engineer on the Databases team, where you'll play a pivotal role in building and maintaining critical telemetry databases for our open-source observability platform, Grafana Cloud. This is an exciting opportunity to work on large-scale, multi-tenant distributed systems, contributing to projects like Loki, Mimir, and Tempo in a remote-first, global environment.

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 projects like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, and our tech stack heavily utilizes Go services, Kubernetes, and cloud object storage.

Responsibilities

• Influence the team's roadmap and your own career objectives.
• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, iterating and improving based on results.
• Drive projects from initial ideation through to operational deployment and customer use.
• Contribute to our open-source culture, potentially beyond your immediate team's scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you manage.
• Mentor team members, engage in design discussions, and foster team collaboration.
• Continuously learn and deepen your understanding of 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 projects from requirements gathering to product shipment in a self-driven manner.
• Experience developing software for cloud environments or strong systems engineering background.
• Ability to write clean, robust, performant, and easily maintainable software.
• Strong problem-solving skills with a pragmatic approach to complex challenges.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, vital for a remote team setup.
• Customer-focused mindset with a passion for creating intuitive products.
• Self-motivated with a bias towards action.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Familiarity with Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles, including on-call experience or personal projects.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Familiarity with on-call duties, SRE tasks, or Infrastructure as Code concepts.