Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote
Summary
Staff Backend Engineer focused on optimizing Mimir’s query and database systems for Grafana Cloud’s observability platform. Designs, builds, and maintains distributed systems (Go/Kubernetes) for metrics, logs, and traces, ensuring high performance, reliability, and scalability at enterprise scale. Owns end-to-end projects, collaborates cross-functionally, and contributes to open-source observabili
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
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 - Mimir Query, Databases
This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the USA time zones.
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 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.
Mimir Squad
The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads, Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the Mimir OSS project, 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.
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.
What will you be doing:
- 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
- Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
- 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
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.
What makes you a great fit:
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.
- 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. Good communication and time management 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
- 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
- Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering
- 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.
- Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems
- Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day to day
Bonus Points For:
- Experience working with Kubernetes
- Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol
- 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)
- Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code
Compensation & Rewards:
In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 174,986 - USD 209,983. 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.
*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: 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. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation 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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