Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote

Far Coder; Northern (KY); Remote; USD 175,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for Mimir Query, Databases, remote in the USA. You will design, build, and operate critical distributed systems, focusing on reliability, performance, and scalability.

You will influence the roadmap, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and own features from idea to production while working in a fully remote, async-friendly environment with strong emphasis on open-source culture.

Qualifications

• Experience building backend services in distributed systems.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or Rust.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS) and Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with observability tools.
• Strong collaboration in remote, async teams.

Responsibilities

• Influence roadmap and your own career objectives.
• Deliver new features with your team and iterate based on results.
• Drive projects from initial idea to production and operations.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems with reliability and performance.
• Be on-call and support the services you run; collaborate with teammates.

Skills

Kubernetes

Kafka

Python

Rust

Go

AWS

Job description

Grafana Labs is hiring a remote candidate for Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote. This is a full time position. Work location: USA. The role typically involves technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Python, Rust, Go, AWS.

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions.

Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost.

We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re 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.

What will you 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 idea 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 follow-the-sun on‑call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running.
• 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.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company‑funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI‑assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow‑ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

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.
• You have good time management skills, which you leverage to work on the right things at the right time.
• 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 squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup.
• Good communication and time management skills are a must.
• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well.
• Experience with leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self‑driven and collaborative way.
• Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering.
• Experience with being on‑call and following the DevOps model.
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.
• Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.
• Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day to day.

Bonus Points For

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

Compensation & Rewards

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 174,986 - USD 209,983. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here . Compensation ranges are country-specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process. *Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process. *Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision‑making and regular company‑wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In‑Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
• Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect.
• *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow. Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

Skills required for this role include Kubernetes, Kafka, Python, and related tools for day-to-day development. Seniority level: Senior.