[Remote] Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | USA | Remote

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a managed observability platform built on open source and open standards. The Staff Backend Engineer will drive technical strategy, lead large cross-functional initiatives, and own the architecture, reliability, performance, and cost of critical adaptive telemetry database systems. The role also includes incident response, operational improvements, stakeholder alignment, mentoring, and technical representation.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions
• Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives
• Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable
• Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence
• Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives
• Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs
• Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning

Skills

• This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the USA time zones
• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
• You are customer focused
• We build everything with our users in mind
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs
• Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
• Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
• Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
• You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
• We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team's workflow
• Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents)
• Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
• Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus (if applicable)
• Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants
• Access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
• 100% remote, global culture
• Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career
• In-person onboarding
• 30 days of annual leave per annum, including 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days

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