Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana App Platform

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs builds the open observability cloud and is guided by open-source values, open standards, open ecosystems, and a transparent culture. Its managed platform, Grafana Cloud, helps organizations work with all of their data at scale, using AI capabilities to understand systems, respond faster to incidents, and reduce telemetry noise and cost. The company serves more than 35 million users and over 7,000 customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Grafana Labs is fully remote, with more than 1,600 team members across 40+ countries and support from major investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.

The organization is growing quickly while keeping its open-source roots, global collaboration, and focus on meaningful work. It values transparency, autonomy, and trust in a highly innovative environment.

Role Overview

This remote position is open to candidates located in the US and Canada. The team is evolving Grafana’s core architecture so the platform can operate as a fully multi-tenant, scalable SaaS foundation and support opinionated cloud apps. The goal is to turn Grafana into a stronger observability app platform where open-source and proprietary applications can integrate more directly with dashboards, alerts, incidents, and telemetry.

The work involves reworking a substantial portion of the product so it becomes simpler, more standardized, and safe to roll out across many users and environments without service disruption.

Responsibilities

• Build new product features and continuously improve the operating experience of the systems you own using production feedback.
• Write, contribute to, and review technical design documents.
• Help shape team priorities and roadmap direction.
• Support and mentor teammates while collaborating closely with teams across the company.
• Take part in customer ownership through weekday on-call coverage of 12 hours per day for 5 days, plus a separate weekend rotation of 24 hours per day for 2 days.

Developer Productivity

The company places strong emphasis on developer efficiency. Team members may use modern AI coding assistants in their day-to-day workflow, subject to security guidelines, and receive a company-funded usage allowance to reduce friction and speed up iteration. The engineering culture encourages practical AI-assisted development for prototyping, test creation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-up, while still maintaining strong review and quality standards. Access to frontier models such as GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, and Gemini 3 Pro is also available.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering ability with hands-on operational ownership of the systems you build.
• Experience working on a SaaS platform at scale.
• Familiarity with distributed systems concerns such as scalability, multi-tenancy, data isolation, and high availability.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain ideas clearly in meetings and in writing.
• Comfort working across functions, aligning with other teams and stakeholders, and incorporating feedback.
• Pragmatic decision-making, a bias toward progress, and comfort with ambiguity.
• Backend experience in Golang, or a strong willingness to learn it.

Compensation and Benefits

For Canada, the salary range for this position is CAD 186,368 to CAD 223,642 per year. Final compensation can change based on level, experience, and skills demonstrated during the interview process. The package also includes Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving team members ownership in the company’s success.

Compensation ranges vary by country. If a candidate applies from a different location, the recruiter will share the relevant local pay range and benefits at the start of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive Here

• Fully remote, international culture built around collaboration and shared purpose.
• High-growth environment with meaningful, evolving work.
• Open communication and company-wide transparency.
• Room to innovate, experiment, and ship independently.
• Strong open-source foundation and community-driven values.
• High-trust, low-ego teams that prioritize outcomes.
• Clear pathways for career development and growth.
• Visible, approachable leadership.
• Supportive colleagues who care deeply about their work.
• In-person onboarding with fellow new joiners.
• Annual leave of 30 days per year, including 3 shutdown days reserved for company-wide disconnect time, subject to local legal requirements where applicable.

Equal Opportunity and Hiring Process

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital status, family or carer status, or any other legally protected characteristic.

The company may use AI tools during recruitment to help compare resume information with the job requirements, but every application is still reviewed by the recruitment team manually.

Personal data handling follows the company’s privacy policy after application.