Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for their Adaptive Telemetry group within the Databases department. The role involves driving technical strategy, leading large projects, and ensuring the reliability and performance of critical systems.

Responsibilities:

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap
• Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects
• Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems
• Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response
• Improve observability, automation and operational readiness
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers
• Mentor and grow engineering talent
• Represent engineering internally and externally

Requirements:

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
• Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
• Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. 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
• Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents)
• Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
• Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders