Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics

About Grafana Labs

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 and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives.

We are 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.

This is a remote opportunity 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 regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. We recently started a skunkworks initiative to bring observability to the rest of the business—making Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise.

As part of this initiative, we are 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. This is an early-stage role on a high-autonomy team, offering broad opportunities to shape architectural decisions and build systems that evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS.

What You'll Be Doing

• Database Development: Take ownership of design, implementation, testing, and operations for 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 Retrieval Workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Product & Infrastructure Balance: 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 to ensure high availability and performance.
• Technical Leadership & Ownership: Shape architecture, API contracts, and engineering practices while maintaining end-to-end ownership of solutions.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Strong Engineering Skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems with minimal supervision.
• Core Technical Mastery: Mastery of a programming language like Go, C++, or Rust.
• Distributed Systems & Storage: Experience with distributed systems, catalogs, table formats, and query engines.
• Practical AI Focus: Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, with a focus on practical real-world applications.
• Production Proven: A track record of shipping software that actively runs in production.
• Cloud-Native & Observability: Hands-on experience with cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and using observability tools to troubleshoot system behavior.
• Pragmatic & Collaborative: Comfortable dealing with ambiguity, iterating quickly on prototypes, and working closely with distributed teammates.

Bonus Points

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

How We Work

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and conducts most work asynchronously in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, clear communication, and high trust.

Compensation & Rewards

• Base Salary Range (Ireland): €104,000 - €130,000 EUR (varies based on experience and skillset).
• Additional Rewards: Equity, performance bonus (if applicable), and local health/wellness benefits.
• Time Off: Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including 3 company-wide shutdown days.