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. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries.

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 also serving up freshly stored data.

This is a remote opportunity for applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany.

The Opportunity

At Grafana Labs, we recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make 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.

The new team operates with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture.

What You'll Be Doing

• Database Architecture & Ownership: Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database, including design, implementation, testing, and operation of 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 reliable 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.
• Cross-Functional Execution: Partner with product and infrastructure teams to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability.
• Operate What You Build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards to ensure system reliability.
• Technical Direction: 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

• Strong Engineering Skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems with minimal supervision.
• AI Experience with a Practical Mindset: Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, focusing on real-world delivery.
• Quick Iteration: Comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.
• Distributed Systems: Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, and query engines.
• Programming Mastery: Mastery of a programming language like Go (Golang), C++, or Rust.
• Cloud-Native Exposure: Experience working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Observability: Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Bonus Points For

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