Staff Backend Engineer, Grafana Ops

Summary

Join Grafana Labs, a remote-first company, as a Staff Backend Engineer in the Grafana IRM squad. This critical team focuses on incident response services globally. You will actively contribute to the roadmap, deliver new features, and drive projects from ideation to operation. The role involves designing, building, and maintaining critical systems, participating in on-call rotations, and mentoring team members. You will work with a team in a fully remote setup, requiring strong communication skills. This is a career-defining opportunity for a motivated self-starter passionate about creating intuitive products.

Requirements

• 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
• 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
• Experience working with Kubernetes
• 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

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

• 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)
• 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