SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 154,000 - 185,000 / annual
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the Databases team, specifically working on Loki (the logs database component of Grafana Cloud). Loki is a multi-tenant distributed system written in Go, operating at scale on Kubernetes across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
You will be part of the Databases team, which owns and operates the telemetry databases powering Grafana Cloud: Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These systems are offered as hosted services in Grafana Cloud and as on-premise solutions via Grafana Enterprise products.
Key responsibilities include:
- Take an active role in influencing the roadmap and your career objectives
- Deliver new features and iterate based on results
- Drive projects from conception through production operations
- Contribute to open-source projects beyond your immediate team scope
- Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems with ownership of reliability, performance, and availability
- Participate in follow-the-sun on-call rotations
- Support teammates, participate in design discussions, and collaborate across the squad
- Deepen your understanding of the cloud product, customer needs, and large distributed systems
The role involves a mix of larger projects (often paired with another engineer), performance and reliability improvements discovered through production operations, code review, design document shepherding, and automated release rollouts. You'll work in a fully remote, globally distributed team where independence and communication are essential.
Requirements:
- Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust also valued)
- Experience delivering projects end-to-end: requirements gathering, brainstorming, shipping to customers in a self-driven manner
- Experience developing software that runs in the cloud OR systems engineering experience
- Experience with on-call responsibilities and DevOps model
- Ability to write clean, robust, performant software easily maintained by others
- Familiarity with observability systems and knowing when to use metrics, logs, traces for debugging
- Strong pragmatism: ability to break down complex challenges, achieve short feedback loops, design modular solutions, deliver MVPs, and iterate
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills (essential for remote squad environment)
Nice to haves:
- Kubernetes experience (highly desirable)
- Queue systems experience (e.g., Kafka protocol)
- User experience with Grafana and Prometheus in operational/on-call roles
- Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems
- Infrastructure as code familiarity
