Staff Backend Engineer

Role Overview

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Backend Engineer in a remote-first environment. You’ll build and operate backend systems that power critical business workflows such as billing, provisioning, and user management, with a strong focus on stateful systems and reconciliation loops.

Key Missions

• Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including SSS, to track the desired state of the stack.
• Collaborate with SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to keep stack lifecycle workflows reliable.
• Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity and contributing to stack configuration reconciliation initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Build production-grade systems with emphasis on correctness, scalability, and operational clarity.
• Break down complex problems into safe, iterative increments and clearly communicate technical tradeoffs.
• Take full ownership of critical systems powering Grafana Cloud in an asynchronous, multi-time-zone setting.
• Write clean, robust, well-tested software that others can operate and maintain.

Requirements

• Experience solving complex workflow and systems problems; strong focus on reliability and developer experience.
• Strong expertise with stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops.
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews.
• Professional experience with Golang and ability/willingness to work across backend services and application code.
• Ability to transform ambiguous lifecycle requirements into explicit, modular solutions.
• Demonstrated delivery from requirements → MVP → data/feedback → iterative improvement.
• Writes well-tested code and cares about product quality and DX/UX.
• Experience delivering projects in a self-driven manner.

Nice-to-Haves / Additional Signals

• Mentoring experience for junior engineers in an asynchronous environment.
• Experience with TypeScript/Node.js.
• Strong Kubernetes experience on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code and deployment/config tooling such as Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, Tanka, Flux, Argo.
• Experience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns, operators, reconcilers, or desired-state systems.
• SaaS experience (provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, customer lifecycle).
• Incident response experience involving configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service state mismatch.
• At least 1 year of fully remote work experience.