Staff Backend Engineer - Databases, Loki Ingest

Company: Grafana Labs
Location: Washington
Posted on: January 8, 2026

Job Description:

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do. 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. This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from USA time zones only at this time. Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Loki Ingest What is Grafana Cloud? Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack. The Databases team owns the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. Our databases are OSS projects that we also offer as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud, and as an on-premise solution. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and running on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (GCP, Azure, AWS). We also have engineers working on Prometheus, Grafana Agent, Mimir proxies, and OpenTelemetry. As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software. Our tech stack is mostly made up of services written in Go, running on multiple Kubernetes clusters that leverage Cloud object storage. What You’ll Be Doing: • 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 ideation 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 on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running • Mentor and 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 As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must. What Makes You a Great Fit: • 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 • Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively • Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must Requirements : • Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well • Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way • Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering • Some experience running complex distributed systems at scale • Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others Bonus Points For: • Experience working with Kubernetes • Experience running kafka at scale • Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects) • Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn • Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code Compensation & Rewards: 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 listed here. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally. *Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process. Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs: • 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. • Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. • Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. • Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. • Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. • Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. • Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. • Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. • Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. • In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. • Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Keywords: Grafana Labs, Burke , Staff Backend Engineer - Databases, Loki Ingest, IT / Software / Systems , Washington, Virginia