Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote

<div class="content-intro"><p>Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. 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. Learn more at <u><span><a href="http://grafana.com" target="_blank">grafana.com</a></span></u> and follow us on <u><span><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a></span></u> and <u><span><a href="https://twitter.com/grafana" target="_blank">X</a></span></u><u>.</u></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><h2><strong>Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases</strong></h2> <h3><strong>This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the USA time zones.</strong></h3> <p><strong>What is Grafana Cloud? </strong></p> <p>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 Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.</p> <p>The Databases team owns and operates the telemetry databases that are<a href="https://github.com/grafana/mimir"> Mimir for metrics</a>,<a href="https://github.com/grafana/loki"> Loki for logs</a>,<a href="https://github.com/grafana/tempo"> Tempo for traces</a>, and<a href="https://github.com/grafana/pyroscope"> Pyroscope for profiles</a>. Our databases are offered as a hosted service in Grafana Cloud, and additionally as on-premise solutions with <a href="https://grafana.com/products/enterprise/metrics/">Grafana Enterprise Metrics</a>, <a href="https://grafana.com/products/enterprise/logs/">Grafana Enterprise Logs</a>, and <a href="https://grafana.com/blog/2021/11/09/introducing-grafana-enterprise-traces/">Grafana Enterprise Traces</a>. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operating at scale on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure).</p> <p>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.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Mimir Squad</strong></p> <p>The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads, Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the <a href="https://github.com/grafana/mimir">Mimir OSS project</a>, and additionally own and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across 3 major cloud providers. Engineers on the team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly.</p> <p>A Mimir engineer has various work streams. They are likely engaged in a larger project with another engineer, and they are also incorporating 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, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems.</p> <p><strong>What will you be doing:&nbsp;</strong></p> <ul> <li>Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives&nbsp;</li> <li>Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.</li> <li>Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers</li> <li>Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope</li> <li>Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability</li> <li>Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running</li> <li>Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team</li> <li>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</li> </ul> <p>We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.</p> <p><strong>What makes you a great fit:</strong></p> <p>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. You have good time management skills, which you leverage to work on the right things at the right time.</p> <ul> <li>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</li> <li>Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication and time management skills are a must.</li> <li>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</li> <li>Experience with leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven and collaborative way</li> <li>Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud&nbsp;<em>or</em> experience with systems engineering</li> <li>Experience with being on-call and following the DevOps model</li> <li>Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others</li> <li>Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.</li> <li>Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems</li> <li>Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day to day</li> </ul> <p><strong>Bonus Points For:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience working with Kubernetes</li> <li>Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol</li> <li>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 project