Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 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.

We’re scaling fast, maintaining 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 extend observability to the rest of the business, aiming to make Grafana the single 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 while also serving freshly stored data. It embraces the separation of compute and storage and is designed for multi-cloud deployment. 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 will be broad opportunities to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative.

What You'll Be Doing

• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: Design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, and storage formats.
• Create a 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.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Operate what you build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Contribute to technical direction: Help shape 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 a 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 and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and define scope where things are loosely defined.
• Collaborative attitude: Communicate effectively with peers, open to feedback, and bring a solutions-oriented mindset.
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, and query engines.
• Mastery of a programming language like Golang, C++, or Rust.
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• 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.

How We Work

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. We expect everyone on the team to contribute ideas that make our products more reliable, useful, and loved.

Compensation & Rewards

All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

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, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication: Expect 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 that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams: High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways: Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership: Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People: Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In-Person onboarding: Thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
• Balance is Key: We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.

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