Staff Backend Engineer

Role Overview

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry to join the Databases department. This remote position (USA time zones) focuses on ensuring all telemetry stored in our databases warrants attention through the development of Adaptive Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Profiles.

Your Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Drive technical strategy, define architectural visions for critical systems, and lead end-to-end delivery of large cross-functional projects using Go (or Python/C++/Rust).
• Reliability & Performance: Own architecture decisions balancing scalability, latency, and cost. Define SLOs/SLIs, manage incident response, conduct blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes.
• Innovation with AI: Leverage modern AI coding assistants (GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, etc.) for faster prototyping, test generation, and documentation while maintaining high code quality standards.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Align stakeholders across Product and Design teams to remove blockers and negotiate tradeoffs in a remote-first environment.

Requirements

• Proven experience shipping large distributed systems with clear evidence of technical leadership.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native architectures (Kubernetes, microservices) and telemetry stacks (Prometheus, Loki, Kafka).
• A passion for creating intuitive products that solve real customer needs.
• Bias towards action: motivated self-starter comfortable working autonomously globally.

Compensation

In the United States, base compensation ranges from $174,986 - $209,983 USD, plus equity and performance bonuses. Actual offers vary based on experience and skill assessment.