Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics

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, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI.

We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries. This is a remote opportunity, and we are looking for applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany.

The Opportunity

At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems. We recently started a skunkworks initiative to bring observability to the rest of the business by building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context.

We are looking for a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for our general purpose data platform. The database layer has both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to support classic analytics queries while serving up freshly stored data. It embraces the separation of compute and storage and is designed to run on multiple cloud providers.

What You'll Be Doing

• Database Development: Design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, and storage formats.
• Scalable SaaS Foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and service boundaries.
• Agent-Facing Retrieval Workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Product & Infrastructure Tradeoffs: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability.
• Operational Excellence: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to troubleshoot system behavior and improve reliability.
• Technical Leadership: Shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Engineering Foundations: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems with high autonomy.
• Programming Mastery: Strong proficiency in languages such as Go, C++, or Rust.
• Core Systems Knowledge: Experience with distributed systems, catalogs, table formats, and query engines.
• AI Practicality: Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks with a practical focus on real-world execution.
• Cloud & Production Track Record: Experience in cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and a track record of delivering software used in production.
• Agile & Pragmatic: Comfortable releasing prototypes, handling ambiguity, and iterating quickly based on feedback.

Bonus Points

• Experience building distributed query engines.
• Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes.
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: €83,000 - €103,700 (Spain base range; varies by country/location and level).
• Equity: Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) included with all roles.
• Time Off: 30 days annual leave policy (including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days).
• Work Culture: 100% remote-first environment with asynchronous communication and flexible working habits.