Senior Backend Engineer - Mimir | UK | Remote

Grafana Labs; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 91,000 - 114,000; Full time

Job summary

A global open-source technology company is looking for a Mimir Engineer to contribute to the Grafana Mimir OSS project. Candidates should have solid programming experience, familiarity with DevOps, and skills in software development within cloud-based environments. The role emphasizes collaboration in a remote setting and the opportunity to influence product roadmaps. Competitive compensation and a remote-first culture are offered, ideal for those passionate about innovation and open-source solutions.

Benefits

Remote work flexibility

30 days annual leave

Transparent communication

Career growth opportunities

In-person onboarding

Qualifications

• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred, but Python, C, C++, Rust or similar also acceptable).
• Some experience delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self‑driven way.
• Some experience developing software that runs in the Cloud or in systems engineering.
• Some experience being on‑call and following a DevOps model.
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.
• Familiarity with observability systems, knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug a problem.

Responsibilities

• Take an active role in influencing the roadmap and your own career objectives.
• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.
• Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operation once they are in the hands of customers.
• Embrace our open‑source culture and contribute to other projects.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning their reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in follow‑the‑sun on‑call rotations.
• Support team members and participate in design discussions.

Job description

United Kingdom (Remote)

Grafana Labs is a remote‑first, open‑source powerhouse. With more than 20M users worldwide, Grafana is used to monitor everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps, and its dashboards have been seen at NASA launches, Minecraft HQs, Wimbledon, and the Tour de France. The company helps over 3,000 companies – including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay – manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self‑managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack. Both options feature scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

We’re scaling fast while staying true to our open‑source legacy, global collaborative culture, and passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation‑driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.

You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love for you to raise your hand for a truly career‑defining opportunity.

The Opportunity

As a Mimir Engineer you’ll join one of two sub‑squads – Ingest or Query – that together maintain the open‑source Grafana Mimir OSS project and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across three major cloud providers. This role offers the opportunity to work on large‑scale, high‑performance distributed systems where efficiency, resilience, and reliability are essential to keeping our metrics offerings competitive and smooth at massive volumes.

Mimir engineers work across a variety of streams. You’ll typically collaborate with another engineer on a larger project while also driving performance and reliability improvements identified from operating the system in production. In this role, you’ll write and review PRs and design documents, help guide automated release rollouts, and participate in the on‑call rotation for the systems you own. This is a chance to directly shape, optimise, and scale one of the industry’s most advanced metrics platforms.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Take an active role in influencing the 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 operation once they are 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 by getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Pragmatism: You can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops, delivering MVPs and iterating based on data and feedback
• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. Good communication skills are a must in a fully remote setup
• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred, but Python, C, C++, Rust or similar also acceptable)
• Some experience delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self‑driven way
• Some experience developing software that runs in the Cloud or in systems engineering
• Some experience being on‑call and following a DevOps model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems, knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug a problem

Bonus Points For

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience 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 with hobby/homelab projects)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code

Compensation & Rewards

In the UK, the base compensation range for this role is GBP 91,000 – GBP 114,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

*Compensation ranges are country‑specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture – As a remote‑only company we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high‑growth, ever‑evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision‑making and regular company‑wide updates.
• Innovation‑Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Built on community‑driven values that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In‑Person onboarding – We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
• Balance is Key – We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. Three days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect.*We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer

We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organisation as we grow.

*Grafana Labs may utilise AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

*For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy.