At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the design and implementation of cutting-edge authentication systems for millions of users.
- Company: Join Grafana Labs, a remote-first tech company with a passion for open-source innovation.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, flexible remote work, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Be part of a dynamic team that values transparency, autonomy, and collaboration.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on user security while working with advanced technologies.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in distributed systems engineering and strong leadership skills.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 80000 £ per year.
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost.
We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. 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.
The Opportunity: Every day, millions of users rely on Grafana to monitor the health and performance of their critical systems. Our mission is two-fold: to provide a seamless and effortless sign-in experience for all users, and to ensure administrators have complete peace of mind, knowing that every user has secure access to precisely the data and functionality they need.
The Identity and Access team at Grafana manages all aspects of authentication and authorization, working across both our open-source and proprietary codebases. The Identity squad owns the authentication layer — the protocols and flows that determine how every Grafana user proves who they are. We actively implement cutting-edge authentication protocols such as MCP OAuth (OAuth 2.1), OIDC, SAML, LDAP, and SCIM. We are completely redesigning Grafana’s authentication at the edge, shaping the technical direction of authentication infrastructure at scale, with a direct impact on millions of users every day.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Set the technical direction for our authentication systems and lead the most complex initiatives from conception through delivery.
- Collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product management, and cross-functional partners.
- Approximately 55% of your time will be dedicated to backend development (Golang), 25% to technical leadership and cross-team collaboration, and 20% to operations and reliability.
- Define and own the technical architecture for the Identity squad’s authentication systems.
- Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, multi-quarter initiatives.
- Mentor and develop senior engineers, providing technical guidance and support for their professional growth.
- Serve as a technical authority for identity protocols at Grafana.
- Drive cross-team technical alignment on authentication standards, patterns, and best practices.
- Represent Grafana Labs at meetups and conferences.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- Deep, proven expertise in distributed systems engineering with Go.
- Demonstrated ability to define technical direction and drive architectural decisions independently.
- Extensive experience building and operating low-latency, high-throughput services.
- Proven track record of leading and delivering complex, multi-quarter initiatives.
- Ability to mentor and develop senior engineers.
- Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and system design.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
- Expert-level understanding of modern identity standards and threat models.
Bonus Points For:
- Familiarity with Kubernetes.
- TypeScript/React experience.
- Experience working with OpenFGA and KiFederate IDP.
- Experience working in security critical environments.
- Experience contributing to or maintaining Open Source projects.
- Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
Remote Staff Software Engineer Identity and Access, Identity Squads | UK | Remote in Derry employer: Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs is an exceptional employer, offering a fully remote work environment that fosters a global culture of collaboration and innovation. With a strong commitment to employee growth, transparent communication, and a high-trust atmosphere, team members are empowered to tackle meaningful projects while enjoying a generous annual leave policy. Joining Grafana means being part of a passionate team dedicated to open-source values and the pursuit of excellence in AI-powered product analytics.
