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Salary: USD 174,500 - 209,000 / annual
Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff 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.
The Databases team owns and operates the core telemetry databases: Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These are offered both as hosted services in Grafana Cloud and as on-premise solutions. The team operates at significant scale, and performance and reliability are critical to maintaining competitive advantage.
In this role, you will:
- Take an active role in influencing the roadmap and your career objectives
- Work with your squad to deliver new features, iterate based on results, and drive projects from conception through production operations
- Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning reliability, performance, and availability
- Participate in follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you run
- Contribute to the open-source Loki project and related projects beyond your immediate scope
- Support teammates through design discussions, code reviews, and collaboration
- Develop deeper understanding of the cloud product, customer needs, and the codebase of a large distributed system
You will work in a fully remote, globally distributed environment with regular video collaboration. The role emphasizes pragmatism, breaking down complex challenges into modular solutions, and delivering iteratively with customer feedback.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar also valued)
- Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, brainstorming, shipping to customers in a self-driven manner
- Experience developing software that runs in the cloud OR systems engineering experience
- Experience being on-call and following the DevOps model
- Ability to write clean, robust, performant software that is easily maintained by others
- Familiarity with observability systems: knowing when to use metrics, logs, traces to debug problems
- Strong communication skills and ability to work independently in a remote setup
- Pragmatic approach to complex problem-solving with bias toward action
NICE TO HAVES:
- Experience with Kubernetes
- Experience with queue systems (e.g., Kafka protocol)
- Prior use of Grafana and Prometheus in operational/on-call roles
- Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems
- Familiarity with infrastructure as code
