Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Loki Query

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is the creator of Grafana Cloud, a comprehensive observability platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations for monitoring, incident resolution, and telemetry optimization at scale. Built on open-source technologies and open standards, it supports interoperability across diverse technology stacks, integrating AI with observability to provide unified insights across data sources. Their clientele includes prominent companies like Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. The company operates fully remotely with a global team distributed in 40+ countries and backed by notable investors.

Role Overview

This senior backend engineering role is focused on the Databases team, responsible for maintaining and evolving telemetry databases such as Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These databases are open-source projects provided as cloud services and on-premise solutions, designed as multi-tenant distributed systems written in Go and hosted on Kubernetes clusters across major cloud platforms (GCP, Azure, AWS). The engineering work also interfaces with Prometheus, Grafana Agent, Mimir proxies, and OpenTelemetry projects.

Responsibilities

• Contribute actively to shaping the product roadmap and defining personal career goals.
• Collaborate within the team to deliver new features and iteratively refine them based on outcomes.
• Lead projects from conception through to operational deployment and customer usage.
• Participate in the open-source community by contributing to projects beyond the immediate team’s scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical, high-performance, and reliable systems.
• Share on-call duties, ensuring ownership of the services managed.
• Support team members through design discussions and collaborative problem-solving.
• Expand skills by deepening understanding of the cloud product and large distributed systems codebases.

Candidate Profile

• Proactive and self-motivated with a strong bias towards taking initiative.
• User-focused with a commitment to building intuitive, customer-centric products.
• Pragmatic problem-solver who breaks complex challenges into achievable milestones for iterative delivery.
• Effective communicator skilled at collaborating in a fully remote team environment.

Essential Qualifications

• Proficiency in at least one programming language, ideally Go; experience with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar languages is also relevant.
• Exposure to delivering projects independently from requirements gathering through concept development to product delivery.
• Experience with software developed for cloud environments or systems engineering contexts.
• Capability to write clean, maintainable, robust, and high-performance code.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with Kubernetes and/or Docker containerization technologies.
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus either professionally or through personal projects, including participation in on-call duties.
• Knowledge or interest in microservices and distributed systems architecture.
• Understanding of on-call responsibilities and infrastructure as code or SRE practices.

Compensation and Benefits

For candidates working in the UK, the salary for this role ranges from £91,000 to £114,000 annually, determined by experience and skills demonstrated through the interview process. Additional benefits include equity options and performance bonuses. Compensation packages are aligned to the candidate’s location with market-appropriate adjustments discussed during hiring.

Company Culture and Advantages

• Fully remote with an inclusive global culture emphasizing collaboration and shared values.
• Opportunity to work on impactful projects in a rapidly scaling company.
• Transparent communications with regular updates from leadership and openness in decision-making.
• Innovation encouraged with autonomy to explore new ideas and deliver quality outcomes.
• Strong foundation rooted in open-source community principles.
• Trusting, low-ego environment focused on results rather than appearances.
• Clear paths for professional advancement and career growth.
• Accessible leadership actively engaged and approachable.
• Team of passionate, supportive peers who are committed to their work.
• Structured onboarding including in-person experiences to integrate new hires successfully.
• Work-life balance supported by a global annual leave policy providing 30 days off annually plus designated company shutdown days.

Equal Opportunities

Grafana Labs is committed to creating an equitable workplace that welcomes applicants regardless of personal characteristics protected by law. The company values diversity as a core strength and integrates it into their growth strategies.