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

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Adaptive Telemetry group within the Databases department. This role involves driving technical strategy, leading cross-functional 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