Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs

3d•$174,986 - $209,983•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for the Adaptive Telemetry, Databases team. This is a remote position for candidates in USA time zones. Grafana Cloud is a composable observability platform integrating metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. The Databases department manages the telemetry databases (Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles) as a Cloud service. The Adaptive Telemetry Group focuses on ensuring stored telemetry is worthy of attention by developing solutions to control and optimize data storage based on usage patterns, retaining only the most valuable data. Grafana Labs is a remote-first, global company that values diversity and inclusion, building diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective.

Requirements

Proven delivery of large distributed systems, with experience shipping and operating complex systems spanning multiple teams and clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
Strong systems-design instincts with a deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
Hands-on cloud and platform experience, including solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and their operational practices.
Reliability and performance ownership, including comfort with defining SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, performance tuning, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
Excellent coding and design skills, writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code.
Comfort with AI-assisted development, being curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally having practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.
Experience with messaging and telemetry, including familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
Ability to influence without authority, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, setting priorities, and driving outcomes in a remote-first environment.
Strong communicator with clear written and verbal communication skills that work across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Candidates must be in USA time zones.

Nice To Haves

Ability to lead technical designs (Go is used, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well).

Responsibilities

Drive technical strategy and roadmap, defining architectural vision and prioritizing work for product/platform improvements.
Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects, including planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation.
Own architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems, making pragmatic choices that balance scalability, availability, latency, and cost.
Define SLOs/SLIs, lead incident response, conduct blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation.
Improve observability, automation, and operational readiness by championing telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and automation efforts.
Align stakeholders and remove blockers by coordinating across Product, Design, and other teams.
Mentor and grow engineering talent by coaching engineers, leading design reviews, raising engineering standards, and helping teammates make sound technical tradeoffs.
Represent engineering internally and externally, communicating technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and representing the team in cross-team planning.
Utilize modern AI coding assistants as part of the daily workflow with a company-funded usage budget.
Engage in pragmatic AI-assisted development for faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, paired with strong code review and quality standards.