Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Loki Query | UK | Remote

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.

The Opportunity: Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack. The Databases team owns the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. Our databases are OSS projects that we also offer as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud, and as an on-premise solution. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and running on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (GCP, Azure, AWS).

As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software. Our tech stack is mostly made up of services written in Go, running on multiple Kubernetes clusters that leverage Cloud object storage. We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow, backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives.
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.
• Drive projects from initial ideation all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers.
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability.
• Be a part of your team’s on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running.
• Supporting other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team.
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• You are a motivated self-starter with a bias towards action.
• You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind.
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs.
• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops.
• Collaboration and communication: Good communication skills are a must.

Requirements:

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar translates well.
• Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product to the customer’s hands.
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or systems engineering.
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience working with Kubernetes and/or Docker.
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles.
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks.

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 here.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture.
• 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’.
• Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law.