Senior Backend Engineer - Observability: Ingest

Senior Backend Engineer, Observability: Ingest (Remote, NASA)

This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in NASA.

What we do

We are the creators and maintainers of Fleet Management, the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart, the cloud-based part of the Frontend Observability ingestion pipeline and other key building blocks to allow our customer base to deploy, configure, administrate and monitor hundreds of thousands of Observability Collector instances worldwide. Our mission is to streamline the transport of Metrics, Logs, Traces and Profiles to Grafana Cloud (and our OSS counterparts) and ensure that required infrastructure can be operated with ease. We do so by working closely with many other teams at Grafana, providing them with a platform to configure the Observability signal ingestion pipeline to their needs as well as close collaboration with our clients and the wider OSS community to ensure our deliverables satisfy their needs.  

Some of the projects we have undertaken include:

• The Kubernetes Monitoring helm chart to easily deploy required Observability infrastructure in kubernetes clusters

• Fleet Management, a cloud based offering to enable our customers to manage remotely thousands of Alloy instances through a central UI (Alloy is our OpenTelemetry Collector distribution),  

• The ingestion pipeline for frontend observability traffic so that no additional infrastructure is required by our customers

• Contribution of various components to the OpenTelemetry Collector project (e.g. Faro Receiver and Exporter) and Alloy (e.g. remote configuration)

What will you be doing? 

• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and make improvements

• Lead projects from concept to implementation, including ongoing customer support

• Become an active contributor of open source projects like Grafana Alloy and the OpenTelemetry Collector

• Design, build, operate, and maintain essential systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability

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

• Participate in on-call rotations and take responsibility for the services you oversee

• Support and mentor team members, engage in design conversations, and work closely with colleagues

• Expand your skill set by deepening your knowledge of our cloud products, understanding our customers, and learning about our codebase

As we have embraced a remote-first approach and our engineering team is primarily remote, strong communication skills and the ability to work independently are essential. We provide support and hold regular meetings through video calls to ensure effective collaboration and alignment.

What are we looking for in you? 

• You are a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action

• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs.

• While the vast majority of your work will be focused on the backend of 1 product, you don’t shy away from making bugfixes and other small changes to other projects (incl. frontend) 

• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: 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 team. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must

Requirements:

• Solid 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

• Experience with delivering projects, from gathering requirements, brain-storming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way

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

• Experience with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code

Nice to haves:

• Experience working with Kubernetes

• 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

In the US, the Base compensation range for this role is $148,505 - $178,206. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

*Compensation ranges are country-specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.