Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry

Introduction

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse with over 20 million users globally. They help more than 3,000 companies 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, featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

The company is scaling fast, maintaining an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work, thriving in an innovation-driven environment fueled by transparency, autonomy, and trust.

This role is available for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and Sweden.

The Opportunity: What is Grafana Cloud?

Grafana Cloud is a composable observability platform integrating metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It enables customers to leverage best-in-class open-source observability software (Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope) without the overhead of self-management.

The Databases department owns and operates telemetry databases like Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles, offered as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud.

Adaptive Telemetry Group

The Adaptive Telemetry group, part of the Databases department, ensures all telemetry stored is worthy of attention. They are responsible for developing Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces, and Adaptive Profiles. These solutions help users control and optimize their telemetry data, ensuring data storage is optimized based on individual usage patterns to retain only the most valuable data.

Grafana Labs is a remote-first and global company, embracing diverse experiences and backgrounds to build teams where every person brings a new perspective.

What you will be doing:

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define architectural vision, prioritize work for product/platform improvements, and influence engineering decisions.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation of large initiatives.
• Own architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices balancing scalability, availability, latency, and cost while ensuring maintainability.
• Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes.
• Improve observability, automation, and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and automation efforts to reduce toil and speed debugging.
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design, and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery.
• Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs.
• Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning.

The company invests heavily in developer productivity, offering modern AI coding assistants with a company-funded usage budget for faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, always paired with strong code review and quality standards. Access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro) is provided.

What makes you a great fit:

You are a motivated self-starter with a bias towards action, customer-focused, and passionate about creating intuitive products that meet customer needs.

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems spanning multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
• Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and operational practices.
• Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
• Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs (Go, Python/C/C++/Rust or similar).
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. Curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools, ideally with practical experience integrating them into a team’s workflow.
• Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
• Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is €106,000 - €127,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture - Talent from around the world, united by collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, 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.
• Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture valuing 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 - Thrive from day 1 with fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn about the company.
• Balance is Key - Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.