Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost.

We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.

About the role

The Databases team owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. Our databases are offered as a hosted service in Grafana Cloud, and additionally as on-premise solutions with Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Grafana Enterprise Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Traces. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operating at scale on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).

The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads: Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the Mimir OSS project, and additionally own and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across 3 major cloud providers. Engineers on the team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly.

A Mimir engineer has various work streams. They are likely engaged in a larger project with another engineer, and they are also incorporating some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production. They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems.

Responsibilities

• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve
• Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Requirements

• You are a motivated self-starter with a bias towards action
• You are customer-focused and build everything with users in mind
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs
• You have good time management skills, leveraging them to work on the right things at the right time
• Pragmatism: You can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and progress iteratively
• Collaboration and communication: You’ll work with your teammates in a fully remote setup; good communication and time management skills are a must
• Solid experience with at least one programming language (we use Go, but familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar translates well)
• Experience leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas, all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven and collaborative way
• Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud or with systems engineering
• Experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems and knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug a problem
• Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day-to-day

Nice to have

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience working with queue systems, e.g., the Kafka protocol
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

Pay

In the United States, the base compensation range for this role is USD 174,986 - USD 209,983. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits. Compensation ranges are country-specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range and benefits at the beginning of the process.

Benefits

• 100% remote, global culture
• Scaling organization with meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment
• Transparent communication with open decision-making and regular company-wide updates
• Innovation-driven with autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things
• Open-source roots built on community-driven values
• Empowered teams with a high-trust, low-ego culture valuing outcomes over optics
• Career growth pathways with defined opportunities to grow and develop
• Approachable leadership with transparent executives who are involved, visible, and human
• Passionate people who care deeply about what they do
• In-person onboarding to help you thrive from day one
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to disconnect (complies with local legislation where applicable)