Senior Backend Engineer (Databases, Loki Query)

Role overview

As a Senior Backend Engineer at Grafana Labs, you will build and operate core backend systems for Grafana Cloud and support open-source projects. You’ll help ensure reliability, performance, and availability of critical services while iterating based on delivered results.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to shaping the team’s roadmap and career goals through active influence and delivery.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems with a focus on reliability, performance, and availability.
• Collaborate with the team to deliver new features, then use outcomes to iterate and improve.

Requirements

• Experience delivering projects end-to-end: from requirements gathering and ideation through shipping.
• Solid experience in at least one programming language; Go is used (Python, C/C++, Rust, or similar experience is a strong plus).
• Self-driven, action-oriented mindset.
• Ability to break down complex problems into modular solutions with short feedback loops (analyze, design, build MVPs, gather feedback, iterate).
• Experience building cloud software and/or systems engineering.
• Strong background writing clean, robust, maintainable, high-performance software.
• Excellent communication skills for fully remote collaboration.
• Customer-focused approach and an understanding of user needs.

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Hands-on experience as a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call) or via hobby/homelab.
• Exposure to microservices and distributed systems, with desire to learn.
• Familiarity with on-call, SRE/operations tasks, and Infrastructure as Code.