Grafana Labs · 7 hours ago
Senior Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | USA | Remote
United States
Full-time
Remote
Senior Level
$154K/yr - $185K/yr
6+ years expGrafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse with over 20 million users of its visualization tool. They are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to operate and evolve multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance of high-throughput systems.
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
Reviewing and defining SLOs for shared database infrastructure, proactively reducing error budgets through improvements to monitoring, automation, scaling strategies, and system design
Improving the diagnosability of core streaming and database systems in production, where possible
Implementing solutions that ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure
Developing fault-tolerant patterns that account for distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbors, and control-plane dependencies
Planning and executing safe upgrades and rollouts across dozens of production clusters
Collaborating with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture, roadmap priorities, and long-term strategy
Participating in PR review and contributing to design documents, automation, tooling, and code improvements that reduce operational risk
Sharing best practices and distributed systems knowledge with partner teams
Participating in incident response, from investigation through resolution and post-incident reviews (PIR)
Qualification
Required
6+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles
Experience operating distributed systems in production (e.g., streaming systems, analytical databases, large-scale storage backends). 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.)
Solid understanding of distributed systems design and large-scale system trade-offs
Proficiency in at least one programming 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
Curious, pragmatic, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)
Benefits
Equity
Bonus (if applicable)
Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum
3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days
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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