Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to help build the first production services for their context layer management system. The role involves designing and shipping core backend architecture, creating scalable SaaS foundations, and powering agent-facing retrieval workflows.
Responsibilities
- Build the core backend services: Design, implement, test, and operate the first services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration
- Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries
- Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings
- 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 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 AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows
Skills
- Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI
- 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 or working with agent frameworks or multi‑agent workflows
- Experience as a data analyst or work with data platforms (e.g., Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, Snowflake, DataBricks)
- Experience building tools for data engineering
Benefits
- Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here
- 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.**
Company Overview