Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs

20d•$174,986 - $209,983•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join their Mimir Query, Databases team. This is a remote position for candidates in USA time zones. The Mimir squad is responsible for maintaining the Mimir OSS project and operating Grafana Cloud Metrics. Engineers on this team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. The role involves influencing the roadmap, delivering new features, driving projects from idea to operation, contributing to open-source projects, designing and maintaining critical systems, participating in on-call rotations, and supporting team members. The company utilizes modern AI coding assistants and offers access to frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to enhance developer productivity.

Requirements

Motivated self starter with a bias towards action and customer focus.
Passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs.
Good time management skills.
Pragmatism: Ability 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 skills for a fully remote setup.
Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred, but Python, C, C++, Rust or similar are transferable).
Experience with leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven and collaborative way.
Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering.
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.
Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems.
Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day to day.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with Kubernetes
Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol
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)
Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

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 idea 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 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