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Salary: GBP 103,958 - 124,750 / annual
Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system as part of a new skunkworks initiative called "Second Horizon." The mission is to bring observability to the rest of the business and make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise.
You will be a Staff-level Backend Engineer on a high-autonomy, early-stage team tasked with designing and shipping the core backend architecture for a context layer management system. This system provides AI agents with reliable, governed access to enterprise context—including data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge—without requiring every agent builder to maintain brittle context files.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and implement core backend services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration
- Build a scalable multi-tenant SaaS foundation with tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries
- Create APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context with provenance and confidence signals
- Partner across product and infrastructure teams to balance fast experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production
- Instrument 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 a new product area
- Communicate effectively and contribute across teams in a dynamic, collaborative environment
- Take full ownership of solutions, ensuring they are innovative, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows
Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and others. Customers include Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. The company operates with transparency, autonomy, and trust, with a strong open-source legacy and collaborative culture.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong engineering skills: proven experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems; self-starter capable of tackling complex engineering problems with minimal supervision
- AI experience with practical mindset: familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks; focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world
- Comfort with quick iteration and experimentation; ability to release prototypes, collect feedback, and iterate pragmatically
- Proven initiative: take ownership and drive projects forward; ability to deal with ambiguity and define scope in loosely defined situations
- Collaborative attitude: effective communication with peers; openness to feedback; solutions-oriented mindset
- Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI
- Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users
- Exposure to cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
BONUS:
- Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows
- Experience as a data analyst or work with data platforms (Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, Snowflake, DataBricks)
- Experience building tools for data engineering
