Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry | Germany | Remote

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse with over 20 million users worldwide. Our open-source visualization tool, Grafana, is used globally to monitor diverse systems. We also support over 3,000 companies with our Grafana LGTM Stack for observability, available as Grafana Cloud (fully managed) or Grafana Enterprise Stack (self-managed). We are growing rapidly, maintaining our commitment to open-source values, a collaborative global culture, and meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment characterized by transparency, autonomy, and trust.

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet every requirement. This could be a career-defining opportunity.

Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry

This role is open to candidates in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and Sweden.

The Opportunity: Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud is our integrated observability platform, combining metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It empowers customers to use leading open-source observability tools like Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope without the burden of self-management.

The Databases department manages the telemetry databases: Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles, powering Grafana Cloud.

Adaptive Telemetry Group

The Adaptive Telemetry group, within the Databases department, ensures all stored telemetry is valuable. This involves developing Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces, and Adaptive Profiles. Our solutions allow users to optimize telemetry data storage based on usage patterns, retaining only the most critical data.

As a remote-first, global company, we value diverse experiences and backgrounds, fostering inclusive teams where unique perspectives enrich our software.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap: Proactively define architectural vision, prioritize impactful work, and influence product and engineering decisions.
• Lead end-to-end delivery: Own the planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation of large, cross-functional projects.
• Own system architecture, reliability, performance, and cost: Make pragmatic architectural choices balancing scalability, availability, latency, and cost, ensuring maintainability and evolvability.
• Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response: Establish reliability targets, manage high-severity incidents, lead blameless post-mortems, and implement systemic fixes and automation.
• Improve observability, automation, and operational readiness: Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and automation to reduce toil, speed debugging, and lower MTTR.
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers: Coordinate with Product, Design, and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and facilitate project delivery.
• Mentor and grow engineering talent: Coach engineers, lead design reviews, elevate engineering standards, and guide technical tradeoff decisions.
• Represent engineering: Clearly communicate technical strategy to non-technical stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning.

We support developer productivity with modern AI coding assistants, offering a company-funded budget for tools like GPT-Codex, Claude Opus, and Gemini Pro, enabling rapid iteration with strong code review and quality standards.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

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

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems: Experience shipping and operating complex, multi-team systems with demonstrated technical leadership.
• Strong systems-design instincts: Deep understanding of tradeoffs in latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience: Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, Kubernetes, IaC) and operational best practices.
• Reliability and performance ownership: Experience defining SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, performance tuning, and driving reliability initiatives.
• Excellent coding and design skills: Ability to write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and lead technical designs (Go preferred, but Python/C/C++/Rust experience is transferable).
• Comfort with AI-assisted development: Curiosity and practical experience using AI-powered developer tools in a team workflow.
• Experience with messaging and telemetry: Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (e.g., Prometheus/Grafana).
• Influence without authority: Ability to align stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first setting.
• Strong communicator: Clear written and verbal communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Compensation & Rewards:

• Germany Base Compensation Range: €106,000 - €127,000 annually. Actual compensation depends on level, experience, and skillset.
• Benefits: Includes equity, potential bonus, and other benefits detailed here.
• Compensation ranges are country-specific.

Why You'll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture: Collaborate with talent worldwide in a supportive, purpose-driven environment.
• Scaling Organization: Contribute to meaningful work in a high-growth, dynamic setting.
• Transparent Communication: Benefit from open decision-making and regular company updates.
• Innovation-Driven: Enjoy autonomy and support to innovate and ship great work.
• Open Source Roots: Work within a community-driven culture.
• Empowered Teams: Experience a high-trust, low-ego culture focused on outcomes.
• Career Growth Pathways: Access defined opportunities for professional development.
• Approachable Leadership: Engage with transparent, visible, and supportive executives.
• Passionate People: Join a team of smart, supportive individuals dedicated to their work.
• In-Person Onboarding: Start strong with onboarding alongside fellow new hires.
• Balance is Key: Enjoy 30 days of annual leave, including 3 company-wide shutdown days. We comply with local legislation.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

Grafana Labs is committed to recruiting, training, compensating, and promoting individuals without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We believe diversity strengthens our organization.

Grafana Labs may use AI tools in recruitment to match CV information to job postings, but all applications are manually reviewed.

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