Backend Software Engineer - Mimir Ingest

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants based in Spain, Germany, Ireland the UK or Sweden at this time.

Backend Software Engineer - Mimir Ingest

The Opportunity:

What is Grafana Cloud? 

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.

The Databases team owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. Our databases are offered as a hosted service in Grafana Cloud, and additionally as on-premise solutions with Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Grafana Enterprise Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Traces. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operating at scale on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).

As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software. 

Mimir Squad

The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads, Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the Mimir OSS project, and additionally own and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across 3 major cloud providers. Engineers on the team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly.

A Mimir engineer has various work streams. They are likely engaged in a larger project with another engineer, and they are also incorporating some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production. They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems.

What will you be doing? 

• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives 

• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.

• Help your team drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers

• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope

• Build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability

• Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running

• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team

• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action. You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind. You have a passion for building intuitive products that fit customers’ needs. You have good time management skills, which you leverage to work on the right things at the right time.

• Pragmatism: You have a bias towards action, taking direction and building a plan of action to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively

• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication and time management skills are a must

• AI: some experience using LLMs for day to day coding tasks and understanding a codebase.

• Experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well

• Some experience with delivering projects as a member of a larger team. Your experience includes gathering requirements and brainstorming ideas, all the way to shipping features to the customer’s hands.

• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering

• Some experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model

• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

• Some familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience working with Kubernetes

• Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol

• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)

• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn

• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

In Sweden, the compensation range for this role is SEK 609,985 - SEK 762,481. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.