Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases

About Grafana Labs

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, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI.

We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.

About the Role & Team

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows customers to leverage open-source observability software—including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope—without the operational overhead.

The Databases team owns and operates the telemetry databases underlying Grafana Cloud and Enterprise offerings. Our databases are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operating at scale on Kubernetes across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Mimir Squad

The Mimir squad maintains the open-source Mimir project and operates Grafana Cloud Metrics across major cloud providers. Engineers focus on optimizing the efficiency, performance, and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes.

What You Will Be Doing

• Influence product roadmaps and drive engineering projects from initial design to production execution.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems while owning reliability, performance, and availability.
• Contribute to open-source culture and collaborate across engineering squads.
• Participate in team follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of running services.
• Support team members through design discussions, code reviews, and architecture planning.
• Leverage modern AI tools (including Claude, Codex, and OpenAI models) to accelerate prototyping, test generation, documentation, and refactoring within developer workflows.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Pragmatism: Ability to break down complex challenges into modular solutions with short feedback loops and iterative MVPs.
• Collaboration: Excellent communication and self-driven time management skills within a remote setup.
• Programming Experience: Strong proficiency in Go, or experience in languages like C, C++, Rust, or Python.
• Project Leadership: Track record of driving projects end-to-end from requirement gathering to shipping software.
• Cloud & Systems Engineering: Solid experience developing cloud-native software or systems engineering in microservices architectures.
• DevOps Culture: Experience with on-call rotations, maintaining operational reliability, and writing performant, maintainable software.
• Observability Knowledge: Familiarity with metrics, logs, traces, and distributed systems debugging.
• AI Tooling: Comfort using LLMs like Claude and Codex in daily development.

Bonus Points

• Experience working with Kubernetes.
• Familiarity with message queuing systems (e.g., Kafka protocol).
• Hands-on experience as a user of Grafana and Prometheus.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary Range: $174,986 - $209,983 USD (US market rate; actual pay dependent on level and experience).
• Equity & Bonus: Eligible for equity and bonus programs.
• Paid Time Off: 30 days annual leave policy (includes 3 Grafana Shutdown Days).