Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for their Adaptive Telemetry group within the Databases department. The role involves driving technical strategy, leading large projects, and ensuring the reliability and performance of critical systems.
Responsibilities
- Drive technical strategy and roadmap
- Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects
- Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems
- Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response
- Improve observability, automation and operational readiness
- Align stakeholders and remove blockers
- Mentor and grow engineering talent
- Represent engineering internally and externally
Skills
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
- Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
- Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
- Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
- Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
- Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team's workflow
- Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents)
- Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
- Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus (if applicable)
- 100% Remote, Global Culture -As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
- Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
- Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
- Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
- Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *\*We will comply with local legislation where applicable.*
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