Senior Backend Engineer

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations. Built on open source and open standards, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI. Customers include Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital.

We build Pyroscope, the open-source continuous profiling database behind Grafana Cloud Profiles. Pyroscope gives engineers code-level visibility into how their applications use CPU and memory, down to the specific line of code, and connects that signal with metrics, logs, and traces across the Grafana stack. 2026 is an inflection point for Pyroscope: we completed the rollout of our V2 architecture, cutting production costs by 92% while significantly improving scalability, and grew the number of customers using the product by 64% last year. Our focus is shifting from standalone feature development to reducing friction across the full experience: better onboarding, deeper integration with the rest of Grafana, and profiles that work for operational and SRE workflows.

• Lead projects from concept to rollout, e.g., read path efficiency improvement, or trace-to-profile correlation, including design, delivery, operations, and customer follow-up.
• Design, build, and operate core components of a distributed database: ingestion, storage, and query, making sharp trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity.
• Wear the product hat: join customer calls, translate pain points into manageable deliverables, and directly shape the roadmap.
• Drive operational excellence: own outcomes against concrete SLOs and unit cost targets, reduce toil through automation, and make on-call quieter every quarter.
• Partner across Grafana: work closely with App Observability, Alloy, Tempo, and other Databases squads.
• Support teammates through design conversations, code review, and pairing in a fully remote setup.
• Participate in on-call (EMEA rotation) for the services you build.
• Contribute to open source: engage the community, review external contributions, and help steer the project.

• Solid experience with a systems language. We write Pyroscope in Go; experience with one or more programming languages (e.g., Rust, C, C++, Python, Java, etc.).
• Distributed systems in production: built and operated cloud services, understand what it takes to keep a multi-tenant data system fast, reliable, and affordable.
• Product sense: comfortable talking to customers, sitting with ambiguity, and breaking fuzzy problems into manageable deliverables.
• Curiosity and courage: ask hard questions and challenge the status quo.
• Strong software craftsmanship: write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain.
• Operational mindset: carried a pager, done SRE-style work or infrastructure as code, treat reliability as a feature.
• Pragmatism: break complex problems into short feedback loops.
• Clear communication: work well in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

• Experience with profiling and performance engineering: flamegraphs, pprof, perf, or similar tooling.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry or large-scale observability systems.
• Experience operating multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes.
• Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata and discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs.
• Open-source contribution or maintainership.
• Experience as an on-call user of Grafana, Prometheus, Pyroscope, or similar.
• Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

In UK, the compensation range for this role is £91,755 - £110,106. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days. We are a remote-only company with a global culture, transparent communication, and empowered teams.

Apply via the Greenhouse job posting link.