Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations. 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 recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise. As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context. The new team is a mix of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires, operating with a high degree of autonomy and ownership.

We’re looking for a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for our general purpose data platform. The database layer has both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to support classic analytics queries while also serving up freshly stored data. It embraces the separation of compute and storage and is designed to run on multiple cloud providers. This is an early-stage role on a high-autonomy team, so you should be comfortable working through ambiguity, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS.

• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Work across product and infrastructure: partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability.
• Operate what you build: instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards.
• Contribute to technical direction: help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.

• Strong engineering skills: solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• AI experience with a practical mindset: familiar with AI technologies and frameworks.
• Quick iteration and experimentation: comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating.
• Proven initiative: take ownership and drive projects forward, able to deal with ambiguity.
• Collaborative attitude: communicate effectively with peers, open to feedback.
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines.
• Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust.
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

• Experience building distributed query engines.
• Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes.
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 104,000 - EUR 130,000. 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.

• 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world.
• 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. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.

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.