Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | US | Remote

Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system that provides agents with reliable, governed access to enterprise context. The Senior Backend Engineer will build and operate the underlying database and scalable SaaS foundation, enabling analytics and agent-facing retrieval workflows.

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:

• 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
• 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
• You're comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset
• 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
• 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