Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | Germany | Remote

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 112,000 - 139,000; Full time

Job summary

Grafana Labs is a remote-friendly company building observability tools that empower teams to understand and act on real-time data across complex stacks. We’re pursuing AI-native data intelligence to give agents reliable access to enterprise context, while maintaining openness and interoperability.

The team operates with autonomy and ownership, valuing curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional collaboration.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering skills and production-grade software experience.
• AI technologies with a real-world delivery mindset.
• Rapid iteration with pragmatic testing and feedback.
• Proven initiative, ownership, and ability to handle ambiguity.
• Collaborative mindset and cross-team communication.

Responsibilities

• Own design, implementation, testing, and operation of database components.
• Help define the architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS database service.
• Build APIs and interfaces for AI agents and internal tools to fetch data quickly.
• Collaborate with product and infra to balance experimentation with reliability.
• Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards for reliability.

Skills

Distributed systems

AI experience

Go/C/C++/Rust

Cloud platforms

Observability tools

Team collaboration

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a 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 you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

This is a remote opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland or Germany.

The Opportunity:

At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. We recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise. As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context. This system helps agents retrieve the right data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge without every agent builder having to maintain their own brittle context files. The principle is simple: the context system retrieves, agents decide, and data teams maintain the intelligence.

The new team is a mix of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires. We operate with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, both as individuals and as a team. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early – while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.

What You'll Be Doing:

• 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: Help define and build the 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 that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.

• Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production.

• Operate what you build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.

• Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area.

• Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams.

• Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. You’re a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making design decisions with minimal supervision.

• AI experience with a practical mindset: You’re familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high‑quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory.

• Quick iteration and experimentation: You’re comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.

• Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined.

• Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with your peers. You’re open to feedback, and you bring a solutions‑oriented mindset to the table.

• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines.

• Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust

• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.

• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience building distributed query engines.

• Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes.

• Experience building tools for data engineering.

How we work:

We are a remote‑first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 97,000- EUR 121,000. Actual compensation may vary based on le