Remote Senior Backend Engineer - Grafana Backend Services | UK | Remote in Glasgow

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 – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – 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, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. 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 role is available for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Sweden.

We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Grafana Backend Services squad.

The Opportunity:

The Grafana backend Services squad’s mission is to deliver the best Grafana service to both On-Prem and Cloud customers in a unified, end-to-end manner, from ownership of the API codebase all the way to operation of its components. Today, this means taking charge of multiple components such as the Grafana Backend API itself and the CLI tool, but also all the orchestration infrastructure required to deliver Grafana at the scale of our Cloud product.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Work with your team to deliver new functionality, then use the results to iterate and improve.
• Contributing to and reviewing design documents for upcoming features.
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope.
• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your career objectives.
• Be a part of your team’s on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running.
• Mentor and support other team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate with the team.
• Regularly sharing ideas and knowledge across a vast array of technical ideologies and mindsets.
• Working closely with the other squads in the Grafana Division.

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 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Have solid backend development experience, ideally with Go.
• Good understanding of storage solutions with an emphasis on relational databases like MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres.
• Care deeply about developer and user experience and the quality of the products that you work on.
• Have experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, and brainstorming ideas to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way.
• Have experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.
• Have experience with mentoring junior engineers in a collaborative but asynchronous environment.
• Enjoy working on complex solutions – Grafana is a highly technical solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and care deeply about their workflows.
• Can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve tight learning loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience with open-source software and/or commercial open-source companies.
• Experience working with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience with CI/CD, DevOps, or Developer Efficiency work streams.
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles.
• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn.

Compensation & Rewards:

In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is £91,000 - £114,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed.