Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Cloud Observability

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from the United States MST/CST/EST time zones only at this time.

The Opportunity: 

At Grafana Labs, our engineers have a dedicated career path and do not have to become managers to progress in their career. Staff Software Engineers at Grafana have a large amount of experience across multiple areas. They are able to estimate, plan, coordinate and deliver large tasks spanning multiple systems. They actively coach and mentor other team members in their team and are able to identify and resolve issues with technology and product processes.

What You’ll Be Doing:

We define senior roles via the scope of their business impact more than via their expertise or their specific activities. So the most important thing we are looking for in an engineer is the ability to take ownership. You will need to drive technical implementations working with the upstream community and contribute to business conversations, helping shape the long-term strategy. You will bring your passion for observability and software engineering expertise to help us take our infrastructure monitoring capabilities within Grafana Cloud to the next level. This will include working with our Kubernetes monitoring and Cloud Provider observability solutions.

• Design and implement high-quality, scalable integrations for various infrastructure components, databases, and applications

• Create middleware components, SDKs, and libraries that simplify development and maintenance of observability solutions

• When necessary, represent Grafana Labs in open source forums, working groups, and events

• Work with product teams, in addition to design and docs, to develop features that align with wider product strategy and customer needs

• Support the technical direction and vision of the team, contributing to strategic discussions and future development of observability solutions

• Work with other departments including Sales, Product, and Support teams to deliver a holistic product experience

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

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

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

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Strong 8+ years of experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but do not require candidates with Go experience. Long term experience in any major language (Python, .NET, Java, Rust, etc) with a willingness to learn Go is acceptable.

• Demonstrated experience working with and monitoring Kubernetes in a production environment

• Experience with cloud-based software development and production systems

• Experience writing clean, maintainable, robust, and performant software

• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry)

• Experience with delivering projects from start to finish in a self-driven manner

• Experience in a hands-on technical leadership role, setting technical direction and leading project teams

• Experience with microservices architecture and distributed systems

• Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills

• Strong mentoring and leadership skills

• Experience participating in an on-call rotation and incident management

Bonus Points For:

• Experience designing and building observability backends for various systems and applications

• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects, with evidence of successful pull requests and community collaboration

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)/ Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

• In-depth knowledge cloud platform internals

• Strong understanding of metrics collection, visualization, and alerting concepts

Compensation & Rewards:

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 168,256  -  USD 201,907. 

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.