Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Second Horizon

The Opportunity

Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system to help humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time enterprise data. We are looking for a Staff-level Backend Engineer to join our new skunkworks initiative and build the production services for our context layer management system.

In this role, you will design the core architecture for context ingestion, storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. You will operate with high autonomy, moving from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS.

What You'll Be Doing

• Build Core Services: Design and implement services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval orchestration, and system administration.
• Scalable SaaS Foundation: Define architecture for multi-tenant services, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, and audit logs.
• Agent-Facing Workflows: Build APIs and interfaces for AI agents, MCP tools, and CLIs to retrieve context, provenance, and confidence signals.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with product and infrastructure teams to balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability.
• Operate What You Build: Instrument services with metrics, logs, and traces; use observability tools to ensure system reliability.
• Technical Leadership: Shape architecture, storage choices, API contracts, and engineering practices for a new product area.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Strong Engineering Skills: Proven experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• AI/GenAI Experience: Familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by Generative AI.
• Pragmatic Mindset: Ability to iterate quickly, release prototypes, and collect feedback while maintaining high quality.
• Ownership: Comfortable working through ambiguity and defining scope in loosely defined environments.
• Cloud-Native Experience: Exposure to cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Observability: Experience using observability tools to troubleshoot and understand system behavior.

Bonus Points

• Experience with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
• Background in data engineering or working with data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, Looker).

Why Grafana Labs?

• 100% Remote: A global, collaborative culture with team members across 40+ countries.
• Innovation-Driven: High trust, low ego environment with autonomy to ship great work.
• Balance: Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including company shutdown days.
• Growth: Defined career pathways and approachable leadership.