Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote United States (Remote)

Grafana; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus (if applicable)

Remote work

30 days annual leave

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a skilled engineer for a fully remote role in the United States. You will influence roadmaps, deliver features, and own services end-to-end with a focus on reliability and performance across a distributed system stack.

You will collaborate with Kubernetes-heavy environments, contribute to open-source projects, and participate in on-call rotations while growing your career in a globally distributed team.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in at least one programming language; Go preferred.
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.
• Familiarity with observability tooling and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Take an active role in influencing roadmap and career objectives.
• Deliver new features with your team and iterate based on results.
• Drive projects from idea to production in collaboration with customers.
• Contribute to open-source projects and other team initiatives.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems with reliability in focus.
• Participate in on-call rotations and own the services you run.
• Mentor teammates, participate in design discussions, and learn the codebase.

Skills

Go language

Other languages (Python/C/C++)

On-call experience

Observability concepts

Distributed systems

Cloud-native

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

United States (Remote)

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 position. We are looking for candidates in the USA time zones.

What is Grafana Cloud?

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.

As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software.

Mimir Squad

The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads, Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the Mimir OSS project , and additionally own and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across 3 major cloud providers. Engineers on the team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly.

A Mimir engineer has various work streams. They are likely engaged in a larger project with another engineer, and they are also incorporating some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production. They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems.

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 Cloudor 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.

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.

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