Staff Backend Engineer — AI Context & Observability

Grafana Labs; United States; Remote; USD 118,000 - 148,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

30 days annual leave

In-person onboarding

Job summary

Grafana Labs seeks a Staff-level Backend Engineer to help build the first production services for a new AI-native context layer. You will design and ship core backend architecture for context ingestion, storage, and agent-facing integrations, on a high-autonomy team.

The role emphasizes pragmatic architecture, ambiguity handling, and collaboration with product and infrastructure. Remote work is the norm across borders with strong emphasis on reliability and scalable design.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering skills with production-grade software experience.
• Experience with AI technologies and practical implementations.
• Ability to iterate quickly, release prototypes, and learn from feedback.
• Initiative and ownership to drive projects forward in ambiguous contexts.
• Collaborative mindset and effective cross-team communication.
• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and GenAI-powered apps.
• Experience in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Familiarity with observability tools to troubleshoot systems.

Responsibilities

• Build the core backend services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval, and API access.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation with multi-tenant isolation, quotas, and audit logs.
• Develop agent-facing retrieval workflows and APIs for context, provenance, and signals.
• Collaborate across product and infrastructure to balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability.
• Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards to improve reliability.
• Contribute to architecture, storage choices, API contracts, and deployment patterns for a new product area.
• Communicate effectively in a dynamic, cross-team environment.
• Own the AI solutions, ensuring they are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with user workflows.

Skills

Backend engineering

AI/GenAI experience

Cloud-native environments

Observability tools

Communication

Tools

Looker

PowerBI

Job description

Grafana Labs seeks a Staff-level Backend Engineer to help build the first production services for a new AI-native context layer. You will design and ship core backend architecture for context ingestion, storage, and agent-facing integrations, on a high-autonomy team.

The role emphasizes pragmatic architecture, ambiguity handling, and collaboration with product and infrastructure. Remote work is the norm across borders with strong emphasis on reliability and scalable design.