Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Upstream

Summary

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Upstream and contribute to the open-source Prometheus and OpenTelemetry projects. This full-time remote role, based in EMEA timezones, focuses on improving Prometheus and Mimir as time-series databases and developing tools for Grafana Cloud Metrics. You will maintain and contribute to open-source projects, influence the roadmap, deliver new features, and drive projects from ideation to operation. Responsibilities include designing, building, and maintaining critical systems, participating in on-call rotations, supporting team members, and collaborating on design discussions. The role requires experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred), open-source project delivery, cloud software development or systems engineering, on-call experience, and writing clean, robust, and performant software. Familiarity with observability systems is also essential. The company offers a competitive salary and benefits package.

Requirements

• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
• You are community focused
• You have a passion for observability and 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 squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Your impact on the observability landscape will be noticeable. Good communication skills are a must
• 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
• Some experience with delivering open-source projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the user’s hands in a self-driven way
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
• Some experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem

Responsibilities

• Maintain and contribute to open-source projects like Prometheus, Mimir, and OpenTelemetry, to drive improvements in Grafana Cloud Metrics
• 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 idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
• 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
• Sometimes meet with customers to discuss new features or support cases

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with Prometheus
• 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 the concept of infrastructure as code

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus (if applicable)