Staff Backend Engineer – Grafana Enterprise

Grafana Labs

Staff Backend Engineer designing backend systems powering Grafana Enterprise for large-scale operators. Building reliable, scalable backend infrastructure in a remote role.

Posted 5/28/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $174,986 - $209,983 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsGrafanaGRPCKubernetesMySQLPostgresPrometheus

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Earning the trust of our large-scale operator customers to further Grafana's "big tent" philosophy of data accessibility and to meet clear business objectives
Designing and leading the development of backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise features at scale
Driving continuous improvement of our engineering culture through words and actions
Driving projects from initial ideation through the development lifecycle to production
Contributing to the scalability, reliability, security, and multi-tenancy of the Grafana platform trusted by some of the world's largest operators
Owning the operational health of our platform by participating in weekday 12h x 5d and separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations. (Yes, we prioritize ops load reduction.)
Hiring and developing the best engineers to build the future of Grafana
Developing your skills as a thought leader to drive continuous improvement of engineering and operational practices across Grafana Labs

Requirements

What you’ll need

Deep professional experience writing production services, from ideation through to production operations at scale
Strong distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, and the trade-offs that come with operating at scale
Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems for large-scale, high-traffic, high-availability, or multi-tenant environments, ideally in the context of infrastructure, observability, or software delivery platforms
Professional experience building and consuming gRPC/protobuf APIs and designing clean service contracts across service boundaries
Strong database skills, such as PostgreSQL and/or MySQL; including schema design, query optimisation, and schema migrations at scale
Experience with large-scale CI/CD systems and build tooling, designing, operating, or integrating with continuous delivery pipelines that serve large engineering organisations or external operators at scale
Comfort working with Kubernetes and containerised deployment environments, including patterns for operating stateful workloads and multi-tenant clusters
Experience with observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing
Familiarity with dependency injection patterns (e.g., Google Wire) and clean, testable service architecture.

Benefits

Comp & perks

100% Remote, Global Culture
Scaling Organization
Transparent Communication
Innovation-Driven
Open Source Roots
Empowered Teams
Career Growth Pathways
Approachable Leadership
Passionate People
In-Person onboarding
Balance is Key

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

backend servicesdistributed systemsgRPCprotobuf APIsPostgreSQLMySQLCI/CD systemsKubernetesOpenTelemetryPrometheus

Soft Skills

trust buildingleadershipcontinuous improvementproject managementthought leadershipcommunication