Staff Backend Software Engineer - Loki

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs develops Grafana Cloud, a comprehensive observability platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Built on open source principles and designed for universal compatibility, Grafana Cloud empowers teams to unify, analyze, and act on diverse data sources rapidly and efficiently. The company operates fully remotely with team members spanning over 40 countries and is backed by prominent investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital.

We maintain a fast-growing yet distinctly open-source, collaborative, and innovation-friendly culture emphasizing transparency, autonomy, and trust. This role is open to applicants located in Australia or Singapore.

Role Overview

The Staff Backend Software Engineer role at Grafana Labs focuses on the Databases team responsible for telemetry databases that power metrics, logs, traces, and profiles including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. These are multi-tenant distributed systems written in Go, operating on Kubernetes across major cloud providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). The team contributes to open-source projects while supporting Grafana Cloud as a service and on-premise deployments. The tech stack involves extensive Go development on Kubernetes clusters using cloud object storage.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, operate, and sustain critical backend systems ensuring high reliability, performance, and uptime.
• Influence product roadmap and personal career goals actively.
• Collaborate with the team to deliver new features and iteratively enhance them based on feedback.
• Lead projects through their entire lifecycle from conception to operational deployment.
• Participate in and contribute to the broader open-source ecosystem beyond immediate team scope.
• Join on-call rotations and maintain ownership of production services.
• Mentor peers, contribute to design discussions, and support team collaboration.
• Continuously learn by deepening your understanding of the cloud product, customer needs, and the large distributed system's codebase.

Candidate Profile

• A proactive self-starter driven to take initiative.
• Customer-centric mindset focused on building intuitive, user-focused solutions.
• Pragmatic approach to handling complex challenges by breaking them into modular, iterative deliverables with rapid feedback cycles.
• Strong team player with excellent communication skills suitable for a fully remote working environment.

Essential Qualifications and Experience

• Proficient in at least one programming language; expertise with Go preferred but Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages are relevant.
• Experience managing projects end-to-end from requirements to shipping products independently.
• Some background in cloud software development or systems engineering.
• Ability to produce clean, maintainable, and efficient code.

Desirable Skills

• Experience programming low-level components such as databases, storage systems, or query engines.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes operations.
• Operational use of Grafana and/or Prometheus, including on-call duties or practical use in personal projects.
• Knowledge or interest in microservices architectures and distributed systems.
• Experience with on-call responsibilities, Site Reliability Engineering practices, or infrastructure as code concepts.

Compensation and Benefits

In Australia, base salary ranges from AUD 168,000 to AUD 210,000 depending on level, experience, and skills. Additional benefits include equity and performance bonuses. Compensation specifics for other locations will be discussed during recruitment.

• 100% remote global team culture fostering collaboration and shared goals.
• Opportunities to address challenging work in a high-growth and evolving environment.
• Transparent decision-making and regular company-wide communications.
• Encouragement and autonomy to innovate and deliver quality solutions.
• Strong open-source heritage guiding company values and work ethic.
• High-trust, low-ego culture focused on results over appearances.
• Clear career progression pathways and supportive leadership.
• In-person onboarding to integrate effectively with new team members from day one.
• Generous leave policy with 30 days annual leave including company-wide shutdown days.

Equal Opportunity and Privacy

Grafana Labs is committed to equal opportunity employment, welcoming applicants of all backgrounds and characteristics protected by law. Candidates should note that AI tools might be used during recruitment to assist in matching applications to job requirements, alongside human review. Applicants' data handling complies with privacy policies.