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 to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI.

Location Notice: This is a remote role open to applicants located in Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland, or Germany.

The Opportunity

At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems—regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. We recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise.

As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context. 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.

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: Help 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 Retrieval Workflows: Build APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Work Across 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. 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 AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are 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 with minimal supervision.
• Practical AI Experience: Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI, with a focus on real-world solutions.
• Quick Iteration: Comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.
• Proven Initiative: Ability to take ownership, drive projects forward, deal with ambiguity, and define scope where requirements are loosely defined.
• Collaborative Attitude: Clear written and verbal communication, open to feedback, and bringing a solutions-oriented mindset.
• Production Track Record: History of delivering software that reached production and is actively used.
• Cloud-Native & Observability: Exposure to cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure) and experience using observability tools to troubleshoot systems.

Bonus Points

• 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.

Compensation & Benefits

• Ireland Base Salary: €117,600 - €141,120 per year (varies by country location and candidate experience).
• Equity & Bonus: Includes equity grants and eligible bonus programs.
• Time Off: Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year (includes 3 company shutdown days).