Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Second Horizon

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries.

We are looking for a Staff-level Backend Engineer to join our new skunkworks initiative—Grafana Second Horizon—with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business and build an AI-native data intelligence system.

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

What You'll Be Doing

• Build Core Backend Services: Design, implement, test, and operate the first services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration.
• Create a Scalable SaaS Foundation: Define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Power Agent-Facing Workflows: Build APIs and service interfaces allowing AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Bridge Product & Infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Operate What You Build: Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards using observability tools to ensure system reliability.
• Contribute to Technical Direction: Shape 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 with solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems with minimal supervision.
• Practical experience with AI technologies, LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI.
• Comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating rapidly with a pragmatic mindset.
• Proven initiative and ability to deal with ambiguity and define scope where things are loosely defined.
• Effective communication skills and a collaborative, solutions-oriented attitude.
• Proven track record of delivering software successfully into production.
• Exposure to cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience using observability tools to troubleshoot system behavior.

Bonus Points For

• Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
• Experience as a data analyst or working with data platforms (e.g., Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, Snowflake, Databricks).
• 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.