Senior Backend Engineer – AI-Driven Data Platform (Remote)

Grafana; Ireland; Remote; EUR 104,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly culture

30 days annual leave

Grafana Shutdown Days

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Databases) to help build the underlying storage system for a general-purpose data platform. You will own parts of ingestion, query planning, and distributed execution, designing multi-tenant SaaS foundations with strong emphasis on reliability and scalability.

You will work across product and infra, building agent-facing retrieval APIs, and shaping architecture for production-grade software in a remote-first, globally distributed team.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering skills with production-grade software experience.
• Practical AI experience and mindset.
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs, data formats, and query engines.
• Proficiency in Go, C++, or Rust.
• Experience in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: define and build architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: build APIs and database interfaces to retrieve data quickly for AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal apps.
• Work across product and infrastructure: trade-offs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability as the project evolves.
• Operate what you build: instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards; use observability tools to improve reliability.
• Contribute to technical direction: shape architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.
• Communicate effectively in a dynamic environment and contribute across teams.
• Own the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are scalable and maintainable.

Skills

Distributed systems

Query engines

Data catalogs

Golang

C++

Rust

Cloud-native (AWS/GCP/Azure)

Observability tools

AI experience

Job description

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Databases) to help build the underlying storage system for a general-purpose data platform. You will own parts of ingestion, query planning, and distributed execution, designing multi-tenant SaaS foundations with strong emphasis on reliability and scalability.

You will work across product and infra, building agent-facing retrieval APIs, and shaping architecture for production-grade software in a remote-first, globally distributed team.