Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases

About the Role

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Adaptive Telemetry group within our Databases department. You will help define the architectural vision for our telemetry solutions (Adaptive Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Profiles), ensuring our customers store only the most valuable data while optimizing costs and performance.

What You Will Do

• Drive Strategy: Define the architectural vision and roadmap for Adaptive Telemetry.
• Lead Delivery: Own the end-to-end planning, execution, and rollout of large, cross-functional initiatives.
• System Ownership: Manage architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems.
• Incident Response: Define SLOs/SLIs, lead high-severity incident response, and drive blameless post-mortems.
• Mentorship: Coach senior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering standards through design reviews.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Coordinate across Product and Design teams to negotiate tradeoffs and remove blockers.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Distributed Systems: Proven experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams.
• Systems Design: Deep understanding of tradeoffs regarding latency, consistency, availability, and cost.
• Cloud Native: Solid experience with Kubernetes, microservices, and IaC.
• Coding Skills: Excellent design and coding skills (Go is preferred; Python, C, C++, or Rust are acceptable).
• AI-Assisted Development: Comfortable using AI-powered developer tools to iterate quickly.
• Communication: Ability to influence without authority and communicate technical strategy to non-technical stakeholders.

Why Grafana Labs?

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

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, color, nationality, origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.