Staff Backend Engineer

Summary

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Engineer and contribute to the development and maintenance of Grafana IRM, a business-critical set of services used globally for incident response. This remote position, open to EMEA time zones, involves working within a collaborative team to design, build, and operate critical systems. You will be responsible for delivering new features, driving projects from ideation to operations, and contributing to an open-source culture. The role requires strong programming skills, experience with cloud-based software development, and a passion for creating intuitive products. Mentorship and collaboration are key aspects of the position, along with a commitment to reliability, performance, and availability of the systems you help build.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go and Python, but if you have familiarity with C++, JVM languages, Rust or similar
• Some experience 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
• Some 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 projects 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
• 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
• 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)