Principal Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Grafana Labs as a Principal Backend Engineer and contribute to the evolution of Grafana, a leading open-source visualization tool. You will play a key role in transforming Grafana's architecture to become a fully multi-tenant and scalable app platform. Responsibilities include designing, building, and maintaining critical systems, collaborating with a remote team, and mentoring other engineers. The ideal candidate possesses extensive experience in distributed systems, Go programming, and cloud-based software development. Grafana offers a remote-first work environment and competitive compensation.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well
• Experienced with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way
• Solid experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
• You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs
• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively
• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must

Responsibilities

• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve
• Drive innovations from initial ideation all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• 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. Drive towards decisions and embrace our culture of “don’t let perfect get in the way of great”
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with Kubernetes, or building and operating a storage service
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus (if applicable)
• Remote-first