Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Upstream | Germany | Remote
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.
Staff Backend Engineer - Databases Upstream
This is a full time remote role for candidates in the EMEA timezones.
What is Grafana Cloud?
Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.
The Databases team owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. Our databases are offered as a hosted service in Grafana Cloud, and additionally as on-premise solutions with Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Grafana Enterprise Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Traces. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operating at scale on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).
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.
Databases Upstream Squad
The Databases Upstream squad's mission is to contribute to the open-source Prometheus and OpenTelemetry projects to further refine Prometheus (and by extension Mimir) as a best-in-class time series database. We also develop tools and proxies for onboarding customers into Grafana Cloud Metrics from other observability ecosystems.
A Databases Upstream engineer has various work streams. They likely are engaged in a larger open-source project with other engineers, as well as mixing in some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production. They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad and the community, and participating in the on-call rotation for diverse ingestion paths.
What will you be doing?
- Maintain and contribute to open-source projects like Prometheus, Mimir, and OpenTelemetry, to drive improvements in Grafana Cloud Metrics
- 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 idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
- Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
- Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
- Support 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
- Sometimes meet with customers to discuss new features or support cases
As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.
What are we looking for in you?
You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action. You are community focused. You have a passion for observability and 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: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively
- Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Your impact on the observability landscape will be noticeable. Good communication skills are a must.
- Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well
- Some experience with delivering open-source projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the user’s hands in a self-driven way
- Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
- Some experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model
- Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
- Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.
Nice to haves:
- Experience working with Prometheus
- Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
- Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
- Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code
In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is €106,514 - €127,817 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.
*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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