Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng | USA | Remote
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AI Summary
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 grafana.com 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.
This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants located in USA time zones (EST + CST highly preferred).
Staff Backend Engineer - Platform SysEng
The Opportunity:
Grafana Cloud moves millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second from our customers' environments into a highly available, low-latency stack that processes and stores this data, and serves them to dashboards and alerting tools. We aim to grow this to hundreds of millions per second, and it's critical that as we grow, we improve our performance, increase our reliability, and, of course, do it efficiently and effectively.
The Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) delivered by the Platform department provides application engineers with the tools, systems and Kubernetes clusters they need to build, deploy and run their workloads. Platform roles at Grafana Labs have an eye for engineers with a passion for performance and reliability, and who enjoy taking projects from conception to production. We organize ourselves into squads to allow focus on: cloud infrastructure and capacity management; security; engineering productivity; monitoring and sustainability; and US Federal compliance.
Because we deploy production services, we have on-call rotations to ensure the health of the system. Everyone at Grafana Labs tries to incorporate and use our product line up into their day-to-day, so being on call is an important way to understand our system and how people use our products.
What You’ll Be Doing:
We are hiring for the Platform SysEng squad. This is an accelerated, cross-cutting squad that is focused on the maturity and scalability of the platform. Currently, SysEng is working across engineering with a goal of reducing new region build timelines to meet customer demands.
We’re part of a Platform Engineering group that manages infrastructure for the teams that are building some of the most cherished tools - Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope to name a few.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- You enjoy working with engineers, as well as with the management structures that are there to support you and enable you and your team to do your very best.
- You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key. For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful. We operate by consensus, you can contribute to a discussion but then commit to the team decision.
- As such, being such a highly distributed company, means we would love someone who is keen on working with distributed systems, too.
- You are eager to learn and grow. There is a lot of room for growth and development, and the team has quite a lot of knowledge to share for those who are wanting to learn.
- You approach development holistically. The team owns the full life cycle of our code; from writing design docs, to looking at developer feedback, and integration testing. We appreciate engineers who enjoy looking at the big picture, and also notice the details of the brush strokes. The Platform team mainly works with Go, Python, and Shell.
- You have experience with operating your code. Since a lot of operators and developers use our software, having some grounding in both of these spaces really helps us with building better platforms for our users.
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 paired with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
Requirements:
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
- Demonstrable experience in system design. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost.
- Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy.
- Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
- Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well.
- Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.
- Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
- Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Bonus Points For:
- You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, “OSS is in our DNA”.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter.
- Terraform and/or Crossplane experience. We have mixed usage - each has its strengths.
- Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet.
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.
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.
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: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization 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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