Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Second Horizon

The Opportunity

Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system to bring observability to the rest of the business. We are looking for a Staff-level Backend Engineer to help build the first production services for this context layer management system. You will design and ship the core backend architecture that powers ingestion, context storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations.

This is an early-stage, high-autonomy role where you will work through ambiguity, make pragmatic architectural decisions, and build systems that evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS.

What You'll Be Doing

• Build Core Services: Design, implement, and operate services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval orchestration, and API access.
• 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 fast experimentation with long-term reliability.
• Operate What You Build: Instrument services with metrics, logs, and traces to ensure system reliability.
• Technical Leadership: Shape architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, and engineering practices for a new product area.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Engineering Excellence: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• AI/GenAI Proficiency: Familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by Generative AI.
• Pragmatic Mindset: Ability to iterate quickly, release prototypes, and collect feedback.
• Ownership: Proven track record of driving projects from ambiguity to production.
• Cloud-Native Experience: Exposure to AWS, GCP, or Azure environments.
• Observability: Experience using 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).

Why Grafana Labs?

• Remote-First: 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 transparent leadership.