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Salary: USD 154,445 - 185,334 / annual
Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system as part of a new skunkworks initiative to bring observability to enterprise data. The mission is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data across the enterprise. This system provides agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context—retrieving data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge without requiring each agent builder to maintain brittle context files.
You will join a high-autonomy team of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires, operating with significant ownership and empowerment to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early. The team values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.
As a Senior Backend Engineer focused on Databases, you will take ownership of building the underlying storage system for this general-purpose data platform. The database layer supports both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to handle classic analytics queries while serving freshly stored data. It embraces separation of compute and storage and is designed to run on multiple cloud providers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, implement, test, and operate database components: ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, and storage formats
- Build a scalable SaaS foundation with multi-tenant architecture, tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries
- Create APIs and database interfaces enabling AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly
- Partner across product and infrastructure teams to balance fast experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production
- Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards; use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability
- Help shape architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for this new product area
- Communicate effectively and contribute across teams in a dynamic, collaborative environment
- Take full ownership of database solutions, ensuring they are innovative, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows
This is an early-stage role with high autonomy, requiring comfort working through ambiguity and making pragmatic architectural decisions. As the team matures, there is broad opportunity to expand or redefine the role based on impact and initiative.
Grafana Labs is 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. Customers include Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong engineering skills: solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems; self-starter capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making design decisions with minimal supervision
- AI experience with a practical mindset: familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, focused on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world
- Quick iteration and experimentation: comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating pragmatically
- Proven initiative: take ownership and drive projects forward, push boundaries to find impactful solutions, deal with ambiguity and define scope where loosely defined
- Collaborative attitude: communicate effectively with peers, open to feedback, solutions-oriented mindset
- Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines
- Mastery of a programming language like Go, C++, or Rust
- Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users
- Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
BONUS:
- Experience building distributed query engines
- Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes
- Experience building tools for data engineering
