Staff Backend Engineer

Company: Grafana Labs
Location: San Diego
Posted on: January 8, 2026

Job Description:

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do. You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity. This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from USA in EST time zone. Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana k6 The Opportunity: We are the team behind Grafana k6, Grafana Cloud k6, and Grafana Cloud Synthetics, used by teams globally to ensure resilient, high-performing systems. This opportunity is with the synthetics squad, who build and operate our monitoring product: a multi-tenant distributed system implemented in Go and running on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (GCP, Azure, AWS), running billions of synthetic tests each month. Staff Software Engineers at Grafana have a large amount of experience across multiple areas. They are able to estimate, plan, coordinate and deliver large tasks spanning multiple systems. They actively coach and mentor other team members in their team and are able to identify and resolve issues with technology and product processes. What You’ll Be Doing: We define senior roles via the scope of their business impact more than via their expertise or their specific activities. The most important thing we are looking for in an engineer is the ability to take ownership. You will need to drive technical implementations working across engineering teams and departments, contribute to business conversations, and help shape the long-term strategy. You’ll bring your passion for observability and software engineering expertise to help us take synthetic monitoring capabilities within Grafana Cloud to the next level. This will include working across products including Synthetics, Frontend Observability, Grafana k6, and Grafana Cloud k6. • Design and implement high-quality, scalable services to be consumed by multiple Grafana Cloud products. • Work with product teams, in addition to design and docs, to develop features that align with wider product strategy and customer needs • Support the technical direction and vision of the team, contributing to strategic discussions and future development of observability solutions • When necessary, represent Grafana Labs in open source forums, working groups, and events • Work with other departments including Sales, Product, and Support teams to deliver a holistic product experience • Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running • Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is entirely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude, good communication skills, and transparency are a must. What Makes You a Great Fit: • Strong 8 years of experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but do not require candidates with Go experience. Long term experience in any major language (Python, .NET, Java, Rust, etc) with a willingness to learn Go is acceptable. • Demonstrated experience working with and monitoring Kubernetes in a production environment • Experience with cloud-based software development and production systems • Experience writing clean, maintainable, robust, and performant software • Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry) • Experience with delivering projects from start to finish in a self-driven manner • Experience in a hands-on technical leadership role, setting technical direction and leading project teams • Experience with distributed systems • Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills • Strong mentoring and leadership skills • Experience participating in an on-call rotation and incident management Bonus Points For: • Experience designing and building observability backends for various systems and applications • Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects, with evidence of successful pull requests and community collaboration • In-depth knowledge cloud platform internals • Strong understanding of metrics collection, visualization, and alerting concepts Compensation & Rewards: In the United States, the base compensation range for this role is USD 168,256 - USD 201,907. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally. *Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process. Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs: • 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. • Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. • Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. • Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. • Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. • Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. • Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. • Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. • Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. • In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. • Balance is Key - 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. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Keywords: Grafana Labs, Hemet , Staff Backend Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , San Diego, California