Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations. Built on open source and open standards, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability, providing unified visibility for teams to understand and act on disparate data. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors.

We're scaling fast, driven by our open-source legacy, global collaborative culture, and passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust are paramount.

The Opportunity

At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems. We've launched a skunkworks initiative to bring observability to the rest of the business, aiming to make Grafana the best place for humans and AI agents to understand and act on real-time enterprise data. As part of this, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that provides agents with reliable, governed access to enterprise context, including data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge.

This new team operates with a high degree of autonomy and ownership. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early, supported by a collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.

We are looking for a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for our general-purpose data platform. This database layer will feature both OLAP and OTLP capabilities, supporting classic analytics queries and serving 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, requiring comfort with ambiguity, pragmatic architectural decisions, and building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS. As the team matures, there's broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative.

What You'll Be Doing

• Database 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, covering tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Agent-Facing Retrieval: Build APIs and database interfaces that enable AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Cross-Functional Partnership: Partner with product and infrastructure teams to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Operational Excellence: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Utilize observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Technical Direction: Contribute to shaping the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area.
• Effective Communication: Communicate effectively and contribute across teams in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment.
• Ownership and Impact: Take full ownership of the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are innovative, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Strong Engineering Skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. You are a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making design decisions with minimal supervision.
• AI Experience with Practical Mindset: Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, with a focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world.
• Quick Iteration and Experimentation: Comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.
• Proven Initiative: You take ownership, drive projects forward, and can deal with ambiguity, defining scope where things are loosely defined.
• Collaborative Attitude: Communicate effectively with peers, open to feedback, and bring a solutions-oriented mindset.
• Technical Expertise: Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, and query engines.
• Programming Mastery: Mastery of a programming language like Golang, C++, or Rust.
• Production Track Record: Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.
• Cloud-Native Experience: Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Observability Tools: 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.

Compensation & Rewards

In the US, the Base compensation range for this role is $154,445 - $185,334. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), providing ownership in Grafana Labs' success.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture: Talent from around the world, united by collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization: Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication: Open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven: Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots: Built on community-driven values.
• Empowered Teams: High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes.
• Career Growth Pathways: Defined opportunities to grow and develop.
• Approachable Leadership: Transparent, involved, visible, and human executives.
• Passionate People: Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply.
• In-Person Onboarding: Thrive from day 1 with fellow new 'Grafanistas' to learn about our work and culture.
• Balance is Key: Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days for team disconnection.