Senior Backend Engineer (Databases, Analytics)

• At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack
• We recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business
• Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise
• As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context
• This system helps agents retrieve the right data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge without every agent builder having to maintain their own brittle context files
• The principle is simple: the context system retrieves, agents decide, and data teams maintain the intelligence
• The new team is a mix of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires
• We operate with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, both as individuals and as a team
• Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early – while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership
• We’re looking for a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for our general purpose data platform
• The database layer has both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to support classic analytics queries while also serving up freshly stored data
• It embraces the separation of compute and storage and is designed to run on multiple cloud providers
• This is an early-stage role on a high-autonomy team, so you should be comfortable working through ambiguity, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS
• As the team matures, there’s a broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative
• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: Design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly
• Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production
• Operate what you build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability
• Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area
• Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams
• Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption- You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
• Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust
• AI experience with a practical mindset: You’re familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory
• Quick iteration and experimentation: You’re comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset
• Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with your peers. You’re open to feedback, and you bring a solutions-oriented mindset to the table
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines
• Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. You’re a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making design decisions with minimal supervision
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users
• Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined
• Experience building tools for data engineering
• Experience building distributed query engines
• Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes