Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | US | Remote

Grafana Labs builds observability tools and Grafana Cloud, a managed observability platform for understanding and improving systems at scale. The company is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to build the underlying storage and database systems for a general-purpose, AI-native data platform, including analytics and freshly stored data capabilities. The role involves designing scalable SaaS infrastructure, enabling agent-facing data retrieval, operating database services, and shaping the architecture of a new product area.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• This is a remote opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants located in the US or Canada
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
• Experience building distributed query engines
• Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes
• Experience building tools for data engineering