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 a new context layer management system. The role involves designing and shipping core backend architecture, working in a high-autonomy team, and contributing to the technical direction of the product.
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, Google Cloud Platform, Azure)
- Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
- Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems
- AI experience with a practical mindset: You're familiar with AI technologies and frameworks
- Quick iteration and experimentation: You're comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating
- Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward
- Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with your peers
- 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
- Equity
- Bonus (if applicable)
- 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