Grafana Labs · 7 hours ago
Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | USA | Remote
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
8+ years expGrafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse that helps companies manage their observability strategies. The Staff Backend Engineer will operate and evolve shared database infrastructure, focusing on high-throughput streaming clusters and related systems while providing technical leadership and mentoring to the team.
Cloud ComputingBig DataSoftwareAnalyticsCloud Data ServicesData VisualizationOpen Source
Responsibilities
Operating and evolving 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure
Diagnosing and eliminating cross-layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.)
Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale
Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics
Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance
Working directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade-offs, etc
Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others
Help define and evolve the technical direction for operating WarpStream and adjacent shared database systems at scale
Lead complex initiatives such as migrations, rollout improvements, and reliability investments
Establish best practices around SLOs, scaling limits, failure isolation, and change safety
Investigate and drive resolution of multi-layer incidents spanning storage, compute, networking, and control-plane dependencies
Identify systemic risks across 100+ clusters and contribute architectural improvements that reduce recurring issues
Improve systems toil and operational ergonomics with automation
Partner with database and platform teams to align on strategy and long-term scalability
Mentor and support engineers as the team matures
Defining and evolving SLO strategy for shared database infrastructure, identifying systemic reliability gaps and driving long-term error budget improvements
Setting standards for diagnosability across core streaming and database systems in production
Leading complex initiatives across high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure
Designing and promoting fault-tolerant architectural patterns that address distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbors, and control-plane dependencies
Defining rollout, migration, and upgrade safety practices used across dozens of production clusters
Partnering with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture decisions, roadmap prioritization, and long-term scalability strategy
Leading design discussions and reviewing PRs with a focus on reducing operational risk and increasing system resilience
Raising the bar for practices across teams by mentoring engineers and sharing distributed systems knowledge
Playing a key role in high-impact incident response, guiding investigation, driving root cause analysis, and ensuring durable remediation through strong post-incident reviews
Qualification
Required
8+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles
Experience with high-throughput streaming systems, analytical or storage backends, or large-scale database infrastructure. Examples of these include Kafka, Redpanda, WarpStream, Postgres, ClickHouse, Snowflake, or Cassandra
Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
Experience leading or driving complex technical efforts, even without formal management responsibilities
Ability to influence technical direction and align teams around reliability improvements
Strong understanding of distributed systems failure modes in multi-cloud environments
Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language (Go preferred, but not required)
Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, cloud storage, and performance/scaling behavior
Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews
Clear communicator who can collaborate across teams and work autonomously
Intellectually curious, transparent, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)
Benefits
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 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.
Company
Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs is an open-source software platform built to support monitoring, visualization, and metric analytics.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Grafana Labs has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (2)
2022 (1)
2020 (1)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$805.23MKey Investors
Lightspeed Venture PartnersGICCoatue,Sequoia Capital
2024-08-21Series D· $270M
2024-08-21Secondary Market
2022-04-06Series D· $240M
Leadership Team
Raj Dutt
co-founder/ceo
Anthony Woods
Co-Founder
Recent News
2026-02-03
DevOps.com
2026-01-16
lsvp.com
2025-11-28
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