Staff Backend Engineer (Alerting)

Grafana Labs; Ireland; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 Days vacation and parental leave

Healthcare stipends

Pension contributions

Learning & development stipend $1,500

Remote-first with coworking space up $

Headspace wellbeing

Employee Assistance Program

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a backend-focused engineer to join the Grafana Alerting squad. You will help build scalable distributed systems for alert ingestion, evaluation, and delivery, working across on-prem and cloud environments.

Join a remote-first team that values open-source collaboration, on-call ownership, and mentorship. You will contribute to roadmap decisions and ship reliable features that empower users to monitor critical infrastructure at scale.

Qualifications

• Proven backend development experience in Go or similar languages.
• Experience with distributed systems and high-scale services.
• Strong knowledge of cloud or systems engineering.
• Experience designing maintainable, ship-ready software.
• Ability to work effectively in a fully remote setup with excellent communication.
• Customer-focused mindset and collaborative across teams.
• Willingness to contribute to open-source culture.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, operate, and maintain Grafana Alerting backend services.
• Collaborate with customers and Grafana Cloud teams to scale alerting on-prem and in Cloud.
• Drive features from ideation to production and participate in on-call rotations.
• Mentor teammates and contribute to design discussions.

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Job description

• The Grafana Alerting squad operates at the core of the Grafana open-source project (link), and our mission is to provide the most in-depth way to let users manage their alerts
• The backend-focused team works closely with customers and the Grafana Cloud teams to make Alerting work on-prem and at infinite scale in Cloud
• Our domain is quite large, so to get an idea of the kind of work we do, here are some projects we recently worked on:
• Build distributed systems to scale alert ingestion and delivery of Prometheus-based alerts
• Unify Alerting setup and delivery to work the same for Grafana and Prometheus-based alerts
• Build distributed systems to scale alert evaluation of Grafana-managed alerts, reaching over 500 evaluations per second in production
• Grafana Alerting is trusted by major organizations worldwide, monitoring essential medical devices and critical infrastructure. We thrive on collective creativity and diverse perspectives, every team member is encouraged to contribute ideas that shape our product into a dependable tool
• Take an active role in influencing our 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 ideation all the way to operations once it is 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 on‑call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
• Mentor and 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 getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co‑working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption

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

As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

Requirements

• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must.
• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, Java, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well.
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering.
• Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self‑driven way.
• You are a motivated self‑starter with a bias towards action.
• We build everything with our users in mind.
• You are customer focused.
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs.
• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively.