Staff Backend Engineer - Session Replay | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs

7h • Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company with over 20 million users of its visualization tool, Grafana. They assist more than 3,000 companies, including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay, in managing their observability strategies using the Grafana LGTM Stack (Grafana Mimir, Loki, and Tempo). The company is rapidly expanding while maintaining its open-source legacy, global collaborative culture, and dedication to meaningful work, fostering an environment of transparency, autonomy, and trust. The Session Replay squad is developing a new Grafana Cloud product designed to help customers understand user experiences when issues occur, by connecting frontend signals (errors, performance, synthetic checks) to concrete session-level evidence for quicker and more confident investigation of production problems. This team operates at the intersection of frontend observability, scalable backend data processing and storage, cross-product debugging workflows, privacy, access control, and performance/cost constraints. The role is early in its development, offering the opportunity to shape the product and evolve the backend architecture, including a migration to a columnar/analytical solution for primary storage and querying of high-volume session data. Grafana Labs is a remote-first, global company that values diverse experiences and backgrounds. They are seeking Staff Software Engineers who are passionate about working with data and delivering seamless customer experiences. The primary technology stack includes Golang, Typescript, and React.

Requirements

• You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key.
• For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful. We operate by consensus. You can contribute to a discussion, disagree constructively, and commit to the team’s decision. You are able to communicate design decisions clearly in written and spoken English.
• Ability to reason about data-intensive systems (ingestion, storage, querying, cost trade-offs)
• You are comfortable owning features in ambiguous problem spaces. We are a small team, working remotely, on a product that will be used by engineers all over the world – the ability to work on your own is crucial.
• You have a good understanding of a software development process that takes a user-centered approach. You easily build an understanding of the users’ context and goals which will help you build the right solution with the maximum value.
• You enjoy working on complex solutions – Grafana is a highly technological solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and who care deeply about their workflows. You value code maintainability, readability & automation.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with columnar/analytical databases
• Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc.).
• Experience building debugging or developer-focused tools.
• Familiarity with privacy, security, and access control in data-heavy systems
• Experience working on performance-sensitive systems (large datasets, real-time queries, session data)

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical direction for Session Replay, spanning frontend, backend, and data systems
• Drive the evolution of our backend architecture, including: Designing systems around columnar/analytical data storage for large-scale session data Defining data models, ingestion pipelines, and query patterns
• Lead the design of investigation workflows, connecting replay with logs, metrics, traces and other telemetry across Grafana Cloud
• Make high-leverage architectural decisions that impact multiple teams and products
• Partner with teams across Grafana (Frontend Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, Core Grafana) to build cohesive cross-product experiences
• Improve engineering standards, patterns, and operational practices within the team
• Mentor engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team

Benefits

• equity
• bonus (if applicable)
• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• 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
• Equal Opportunity Employer

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees