Backend Engineer, Observability: Ingest (remote, USA) - Remote Eligible

Backend Engineer, Observability: Ingest

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics, logs, and traces.

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.

The Opportunity

We are the creators and maintainers of Fleet Management, the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart, the cloud-based part of the Frontend Observability ingestion pipeline and other key building blocks to allow our customer base to deploy, configure, administrate and monitor hundreds of thousands of Observability Collector instances worldwide. Our mission is to streamline the transport of Metrics, Logs, Traces and Profiles to Grafana Cloud (and our OSS counterparts) and ensure that required infrastructure can be operated with ease. We do so by working closely with many other teams at Grafana, providing them with a platform to configure the Observability signal ingestion pipeline to their needs as well as close collaboration with our clients and the wider OSS community to ensure our deliverables satisfy their needs.

Some of the projects we have undertaken include:

• The Kubernetes Monitoring helm chart to easily deploy required Observability infrastructure in kubernetes clusters
• Fleet Management, a cloud based offering to enable our customers to manage remotely thousands of Alloy instances through a central UI (Alloy is our OpenTelemetry Collector distribution)
• The ingestion pipeline for frontend observability traffic so that no additional infrastructure is required by our customers
• Contribution of various components to the OpenTelemetry Collector project (e.g. Faro Receiver and Exporter) and Alloy (e.g. remote configuration)

What You'll Be Doing

• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and make improvements
• Lead projects from concept to implementation, including ongoing customer support
• Become an active contributor of open source projects like Grafana Alloy and the OpenTelemetry Collector
• Design, build, operate, and maintain essential systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability
• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Participate in on-call rotations and take responsibility for the services you oversee
• Support and mentor team members, engage in design conversations, and work closely with colleagues
• Expand your skill set by deepening your knowledge of our cloud products, understanding our customers, and learning about our codebase

As we have embraced a remote-first approach and our engineering team is primarily remote, strong communication skills and the ability to work independently are essential. We provide support and hold regular meetings through video calls to ensure effective collaboration and alignment.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• You are a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs.
• While the vast majority of your work will be focused on the backend of 1 product, you don't shy away from making bugfixes and other small changes to other projects (incl. frontend)
• 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 team. You'll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must

What you'll bring to the role

• 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 delivering projects, from gathering requirements, brain-storming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer's hands in a self-driven way
• Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
• Experience with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code

Bonus Points For

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• 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)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems

In the US, the Base compensation range for this role is $123,000 - $154,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

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.