Staff Backend Engineer - Second Horizon | US | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Second Horizon team at Grafana Labs. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in building the first production services for our context layer management system. This is an early-stage role that requires a high degree of autonomy, ownership, and collaboration with a global team of engineers. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Backend Engineer, your key responsibilities will include: - Designing and shipping the core backend architecture that powers ingestion, context storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. - Building scalable SaaS foundations, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries. - Powering agent-facing retrieval workflows by building APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings. - Partnering with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability. - Operating what you build by instrumenting services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. - Contributing to technical direction by shaping the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area. - Effective communication with the team to ensure seamless collaboration and contribution across teams. - Taking full ownership of the AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows. WHAT YOU'LL NEED - Strong engineering skills with solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. - AI experience with a practical mindset, focusing on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory. - Quick iteration and experimentation skills, with the ability to tackle complex engineering problems and make UI design decisions with minimal supervision. WHY REMOTE Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. As a remote team member, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere and be part of a global, collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership. BENEFITS - Competitive salary and bonus structure. - Comprehensive health plan. - Parental leave policy. - Education stipend. - Life insurance. - Equipment stipend. - Flexible schedule. - Opportunities for professional growth and development in a dynamic and innovative environment.