Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases

About the Role

Grafana Labs is looking for 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, including Adaptive Metrics, Logs, Traces, and Profiles, ensuring our customers can optimize their data storage and costs effectively.

What You Will Be Doing

• Technical Strategy: Define architectural vision and roadmap for large-scale telemetry systems.
• End-to-End Delivery: Lead the planning, design, and execution of cross-functional, high-impact initiatives.
• System Ownership: Manage architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical database systems (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope).
• Reliability Engineering: Define SLOs/SLIs, lead incident response, and drive blameless post-mortems.
• Mentorship: Coach senior and mid-level engineers and raise engineering standards across the team.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Coordinate with Product and Design teams to negotiate tradeoffs and remove blockers.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Distributed Systems: Proven experience shipping and operating complex, large-scale distributed systems.
• Systems Design: Deep understanding of tradeoffs regarding latency, consistency, availability, and cost.
• Cloud-Native Experience: Solid background in microservices, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Coding Proficiency: Excellent skills in Go (or similar languages like Python, C++, or Rust).
• AI-Assisted Development: Comfortable integrating AI-powered developer tools into your daily workflow.
• Communication: Ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and communicate technical strategy clearly.
• Observability: Familiarity with Prometheus, Grafana, and streaming systems like Kafka.

Why Join Grafana Labs?

• Remote-First Culture: Work from anywhere with a global, collaborative team.
• Innovation-Driven: High-trust environment with autonomy to ship meaningful work.
• Open Source Roots: Built on community-driven values.
• Balance: 30 days of annual leave, including company-wide shutdown days.
• Growth: Defined career pathways and approachable leadership.