Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Alerting | Ireland | Remote

Grafana; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Job summary

Grafana Labs, a fully remote company, is seeking engineers for the Grafana Alerting squad. You will design, build, operate, and maintain reliable distributed systems handling alert ingestion, evaluation, and delivery at scale.

The role emphasizes collaboration, open-source contributions, and ownership of services from ideation through production. Ideal candidates have strong programming experience (Go preferred) and comfort with a remote-first, highly communicative environment across teams and

Qualifications

• Self-starter with initiative and strong collaboration.
• Customer-focused mindset and ability to ship usable features.
• Experience delivering projects from idea to production in a distributed system.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Go preferred).

Responsibilities

• Influence roadmap and own career objectives within the team.
• Collaborate to deliver new features and iterate based on results.
• Own the design, build, operation, and reliability of critical services.
• Contribute to open-source culture and cross-project work.
• Participate in on-call rotations and mentor teammates.

Skills

Go

Python familiarity

Java familiarity

C++ familiarity

Tools

Prometheus

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 applications from Ireland.

The Opportunity:

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. The team's scope spans both Grafana Alerting and the SLOs product, so engineers get to work across two products that are deeply connected in how they help users detect and respond to problems.

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.

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.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• 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

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.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
• You are customer focused
• We build everything with our users in mind.
• 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
• 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
• Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming