Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana App Platform | UK | Remote
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 position. We are looking for candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Ireland only.
The Opportunity:
As our Cloud / Grafana-as-a-service business continues to grow, we've started to change Grafana's core architecture to be fully multi-tenant and scalable, as well as a solid platform for our opinionated Cloud apps.
We're looking for someone with a lot of experience with SaaS platforms at scale. We are turning Grafana into a proper observability app platform where OSS and proprietary apps can directly tap into dashboards, alerts, incidents, and telemetry and deliver even more integrated experiences.
To get there, we need to refactor a big part of Grafana so that it’s simpler and standardized. Grafana is used by countless OSS and Cloud users across different platforms, so planning and rolling out changes safely to avoid service disruptions is crucial; we are looking for someone who is excited about this sort of work.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Coding new features, enhancing the operational experience of the systems you develop, and iteratively improving them based on production insights
- Authoring, contributing to and reviewing design documents
- Taking an active role in shaping the roadmap
- Mentoring and supporting other team members and collaborating with different teams across the organization
- Owning the experience of our customers by participating in weekday 12h x 5d and a separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations.
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- You have strong coding skills and operational experience; you were responsible for operating the software you have built.
- You have worked on a SaaS platform and dealt with common distributed systems problems (e.g. scalability, multi-tenancy, data isolation, HA, …)
- You have excellent communication skills. You can express your ideas with great clarity in writing and during meetings. You know when to pick which mode of communication.
- You are willing to work across teams. Your work has to be aligned with the needs of other squads and external stakeholders. You make your plans transparent, bring stakeholders on board, and are open to feedback and suggestions.
- You are pragmatic; you prioritize progress over perfection; you can handle ambiguity.
- We are using Golang on the backend; you are either already familiar with Golang or are excited to learn the language
In UK, the compensation range for this role is £103,958 - £124,750. 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.
Equal Opportunity Employer: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.
Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
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