Senior Backend Engineer - Distributed DB & Analytics

Grafana; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 days vacation + holidays

Health care stipend

Pension contributions

Learning & development stipend

Remote-friendly culture

Co-working space stipend

Headspace subscription

Employee assistance program

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Grafana is seeking a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to design, build, and operate the underlying storage systems for our data platform. You will own components from ingestion to query execution, and shape a multi-tenant SaaS foundation with strong observability.

You’ll work across product and infra, aligning fast experimentation with reliability, and contribute to architecture while communicating clearly in a highly collaborative environment.

Qualifications

• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines.
• Exposure to cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Proven track record of delivering production software used by users.
• Strong initiative and ownership; able to deal with ambiguity.
• Mastery of a programming language like Go, C++, or Rust.
• AI experience with a practical mindset.

Responsibilities

• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: multi-tenant architecture, tenant isolation, quotas, audit logs, background jobs and service boundaries.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows by building APIs and database interfaces for AI agents and internal tools.
• Work across product and infra to balance fast experimentation with long-term reliability.
• Operate what you build: instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards.
• Contribute to technical direction: architecture, service boundaries, deployment patterns and engineering practices.
• Communicate effectively across teams and take ownership of outcomes.

Skills

Observability

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Golang

C++

Rust

AI experience

Production-grade software

Data warehouses / data lakes

Data engineering tools

Collaboration

Tools

Go tooling

Rust tooling

Job description

Grafana is seeking a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to design, build, and operate the underlying storage systems for our data platform. You will own components from ingestion to query execution, and shape a multi-tenant SaaS foundation with strong observability.

You’ll work across product and infra, aligning fast experimentation with reliability, and contribute to architecture while communicating clearly in a highly collaborative environment.