Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Second Horizon (Remote, Germany)

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs delivers Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations worldwide. Built on open-source standards, the platform integrates AI with observability to provide unified insights across diverse data sources, empowering teams and automated agents to monitor, understand, and take action on their data efficiently. The company operates fully remotely with employees in over 40 countries and is backed by prominent investors.

Role Overview

This Staff Backend Engineer role is a core position in a new initiative at Grafana Labs aimed at expanding observability to the broader enterprise by developing an AI-native data intelligence system. This system offers governance and reliable access to enterprise context for AI agents and related tools. The team operates with high autonomy in a collaborative and innovative culture, focused on building scalable production-grade backend services from a prototype phase to a SaaS product.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and operate backend services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval APIs, configuration, and administration.
• Architect and help build a scalable multi-tenant SaaS platform including features like tenant isolation, usage monitoring, quotas, audit logging, background tasks, and clearly defined service boundaries.
• Develop interfaces that enable AI agents and related tools to access relevant contextual data, metadata, lineage, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Collaborate closely with product and infrastructure teams to balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability.
• Instrument services using metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards to monitor and improve reliability.
• Influence technical direction relating to architecture, APIs, deployment, and engineering best practices for a new product area.
• Communicate effectively across a dynamic, multi-functional team and a remote working environment.
• Own the full lifecycle of AI-related solutions ensuring scalability, maintainability, and alignment with user workflows.

Desired Qualifications

• Proven experience building robust, scalable, production backend software.
• Practical knowledge of AI technologies and frameworks, focused on real-world application.
• Comfort with iterative development cycles including prototyping, feedback, and refinement.
• Initiative to define project scope amid ambiguity and drive impactful results.
• Collaborative mindset with strong communication skills and openness to feedback.
• Familiarity with LLMs, prompt engineering, and GenAI-powered applications.
• Experience delivering software products actively used in production environments.
• Working knowledge of cloud-native platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience employing observability tools to monitor and debug system performance.

Additional Advantages

• Background in agent frameworks or multi-agent system workflows.
• Experience in data analysis or with data platform tools like Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Snowflake, or Databricks.
• Expertise in developing tools for data engineering teams.

Work Environment and Culture

Grafana Labs follows a remote-first approach, emphasizing asynchronous communication and inclusive collaboration. The culture supports autonomy, transparency, and trust, with a strong emphasis on delivering reliable, meaningful software. The company offers a clear path for growth, approachable leadership, and a passionate global team.

Compensation & Benefits

For candidates in Germany, the base salary range is €109,709 to €131,651 annually, variable based on experience and skills. Additional benefits include equity and potential bonuses, with compensation ranges tailored per country. The company provides 30 annual leave days including three dedicated company shutdown days to promote work-life balance. Onboarding includes in-person sessions to ensure new hires succeed from day one.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer fostering an inclusive environment regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. The recruitment process may utilize AI tools to assist in candidate-job matching supplemented by human review. Personal data use is handled transparently in accordance with privacy policies.