Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Backend Services | US | Remote
$175k - $210k USD
Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).
We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Grafana Backend Services squad.
The Opportunity:
The Grafana backend Services squad’s mission is to deliver the best Grafana service to both On-Prem and Cloud customers in a unified, end-to-end manner, from ownership of the API codebase all the way to operation of its components. Today, this means taking charge of multiple components such as the Grafana Backend API itself and the CLI tool, but also all the orchestration infrastructure required to deliver Grafana at the scale of our Cloud product.
What You'll Be Doing:
- Work with your team to deliver new functionality, then use the results to iterate and improve
- Contributing to and reviewing design documents for upcoming features
- Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
- Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your career objectives
- Be a part of your team’s on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
- Mentor and support other team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate with the team
- Regularly sharing ideas and knowledge across a vast array of technical ideologies and mindsets
- Working closely with the other squads in the Grafana Division
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- Have solid backend development experience, ideally with Go
- Good understanding of storage solutions with an emphasis on relational databases like MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres
- Care deeply about developer and user experience and the quality of the products that you work on
- Have experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, and brainstorming ideas to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way
- Have experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
- Have experience with mentoring junior engineers in a collaborative but asynchronous environment
- Enjoy working on complex solutions – Grafana is a highly technical solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and care deeply about their workflows.
- Can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve tight learning loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively
Bonus Points For:
- Experience with open-source software and/or commercial open-source companies
- Experience working with Docker and Kubernetes
- Experience with CI/CD, DevOps, or Developer Efficiency work streams
- Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles
- Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks
- Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
In United States, the compensation range for this role is $174,986 - $209,983 USD. 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.
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*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.
Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:
- 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.
Equal Opportunity Employer: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.
Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
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