Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | USA | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE We're seeking a highly skilled Staff Backend Engineer to join our Adaptive Telemetry team at Grafana Labs. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for driving technical strategy and roadmap, leading end-to-end delivery of large projects, and owning architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for: - Driving technical strategy and roadmap, defining the architectural vision and prioritizing work that unlocks major product or platform improvements - Leading end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects, owning planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation of large initiatives - Owning architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems, making pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency, and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable - Defining SLOs/SLIs and leading incident response, establishing measurable reliability targets, running high-severity incident response, leading blameless post-mortems, and driving systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence - Improving observability, automation, and operational readiness, championing telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging, and lower MTTR - Aligning stakeholders and removing blockers, coordinating across Product, Design, and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives - Mentoring and growing engineering talent, coaching senior and mid-level engineers, leading design reviews, raising engineering standards, and helping teammates make sound technical tradeoffs - Representing engineering internally and externally, communicating technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and representing the team in cross-team planning WHAT YOU'LL NEED - 7+ years of experience in software development, with a focus on backend engineering - Strong expertise in database systems, including design, implementation, and optimization - Experience with cloud-based infrastructure and distributed systems - Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to analyze complex technical issues and develop effective solutions - Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams - Experience with Agile development methodologies and version control systems - Strong knowledge of software design patterns, principles, and best practices WHY REMOTE Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company, with a global team of 1,600+ members across 40+ countries. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we're committed to creating a workplace culture that's welcoming and inclusive for people of all backgrounds and experiences. BENEFITS - Competitive salary and benefits package - Flexible schedule and remote work arrangement - Opportunities for professional growth and development - Access to cutting-edge technology and tools - Collaborative and inclusive work environment - Comprehensive health plan, parental leave, and education stipend - Equipment stipend and flexible budget for professional development - Opportunities for mentorship and growth within the company