Staff Backend Software Engineer - Loki | NASA | Remote

Grafana Labs

1d • $174,500 - $209,000 • Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is hiring a remote Staff Backend Software Engineer to work on its telemetry databases and cloud observability offerings. The role is based in the US or Canada. Grafana Labs is a remote-first company, and its Databases team operates Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope as hosted Grafana Cloud services and on-premise solutions. These are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and run on Kubernetes across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

The engineer will help influence the roadmap and deliver features, taking projects from initial ideas through customer operations. The position involves designing, building, operating, and maintaining critical systems, contributing to open-source projects, and collaborating with teammates in a fully remote environment. Engineers participate in follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of service reliability, performance, and availability. The posting also describes the Mimir squad’s work maintaining Mimir and Grafana Cloud Metrics, but does not specify that this position is assigned to that squad.

The role calls for a self-directed, customer-focused engineer who communicates well, breaks complex work into iterative solutions, and can deliver software from requirements through release. Candidates should have solid experience in a programming language, cloud software or systems engineering, on-call and DevOps practices, and writing clean, robust, performant, maintainable software. Familiarity with observability systems is also sought.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language; the team uses Go, and familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages translates well.
• Some experience delivering projects from requirements gathering and idea development through shipping a product to customers, in a self-driven manner.
• Some experience developing software that runs in the cloud or in systems engineering.
• Some experience being on-call and following the DevOps model.
• Experience writing clean, robust, performant software that is maintainable by others.
• Familiarity with observability systems and knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug problems.
• Self-starter with a bias toward action and a customer-focused approach.
• Pragmatism in breaking down complex challenges, delivering modular solutions and MVPs, gathering feedback, and iterating.
• Good communication and collaboration skills for working in a fully remote squad.
• Independent attitude suited to a remote-first engineering organization.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with Kubernetes.
• Experience working with queue systems, such as the Kafka protocol.
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles, on-call work, or hobby and homelab projects.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn.
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code.

Responsibilities

• Influence the team roadmap and personal career objectives.
• Work with the team to deliver features and iterate based on results.
• Drive projects from initial idea through operations after they reach customers.
• Contribute to open-source projects, including projects beyond the immediate team’s scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning their reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in the team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of operated services.
• Support teammates, participate in design discussions, and collaborate with the team.
• Build knowledge of the cloud product, customers, and large distributed-system codebase.
• Write and review pull requests and design documents, shepherd automated release rollouts, and participate in on-call rotations, as described for engineers on the Mimir team.

Benefits

• Equity.
• Bonus, if applicable.
• 30 days of annual leave per year under the global annual leave policy, with three days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
• In-person onboarding.
• Career growth pathways.
• Other benefits are referenced as being listed elsewhere, but are not specified in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed