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 only at this time).
Staff Software Engineer - Platform, Application Core ServicesApplication Core Services (AppCore) builds the control plane behind Grafana Cloud, designing the systems that create, configure, and operate thousands of customer environments safely and reliably.
Working at the intersection of product, platform, and operations, the team develops the services that power critical customer and internal workflows, from provisioning and cloud marketplace integrations to billing and customer lifecycle management. As Grafana Cloud continues to scale, we're solving complex distributed systems challenges around reliability, automation, and operational efficiency.
We're looking for engineers who enjoy building large-scale backend systems, improving developer experience, and leading technical initiatives that have a direct impact on both our customers and the engineers building on our platform.
As a remote-first, open source company, we value collaboration, ownership, and diverse perspectives, with opportunities to contribute across teams and to the broader OSS community.
What You’ll Be Doing:
You'll help build and operate the control plane behind Grafana Cloud. The team owns the systems responsible for creating, configuring, reconciling, migrating, and operating customer stacks at scale.
In this role you'll:
- Design and build distributed backend systems that keep customer stack state consistent across Grafana Cloud.
- Develop reconciliation and automation workflows that improve reliability, reduce operational complexity, and safely manage infrastructure changes.
- Lead technical initiatives spanning multiple services and partner closely with Product, Infrastructure, Hosted Grafana, and adjacent platform teams.
- Improve deployment workflows, regional expansion, rollout safety, and incident recovery across thousands of customer environments.
- Own the production systems you build, including observability, operational tooling, on-call, and continuous reliability improvements.
- As a remote-first team, we share ownership through a global follow-the-sun on-call rotation.
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 with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer who enjoys solving complex distributed systems problems and leading technical work from idea to production.
You'll likely be successful if you:
- Have experience building and operating large-scale SaaS or cloud platforms.
- Have strong backend engineering experience in Go or another systems language, and are comfortable learning new technologies.
- Have experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Enjoy solving problems around distributed systems, eventual consistency, stateful services, and system reliability.
- Can independently lead projects, navigate ambiguity, and influence technical direction across teams.
- Care about writing clean, maintainable software and improving the developer experience.
- Have experience participating in production operations, incident response, and on-call.
- Are comfortable working in a remote-first, highly collaborative environment.
Bonus Points For:
We'd especially love to hear from you if you have experience with:
- Kubernetes operators, reconcilers, or control plane development.
- Go and TypeScript/Node.js.
- Terraform, Flux, Argo, Jsonnet, Tanka, or similar infrastructure tooling.
- SaaS provisioning, customer lifecycle systems, or multi-tenant platforms.
- Solving problems related to configuration drift, partial failures, or cross-service consistency.
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: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation 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.
#LI-Remote
Skills Required
- 8+ years of engineering experience
- Experience with high-throughput streaming systems
- Strong Kubernetes experience
- Experience leading complex technical efforts
- Ability to influence technical direction
- Strong understanding of distributed systems
- Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language
- Clear communicator
Grafana Labs Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Grafana Labs and has not been reviewed or approved by Grafana Labs.
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage is described as comprehensive, including medical, dental, and vision options with low deductibles in the US and local equivalents in other countries. Mental health support is also included, alongside wellness support that can be applied to therapy or ergonomic needs.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time off is positioned as notably generous, including 30 days of paid vacation plus holidays and additional shutdown days. Parental leave and sick leave are also part of the time-off package, supporting broader work-life needs.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is presented as a standard component of compensation, with RSUs included across roles to provide ownership in company outcomes. The package framing emphasizes total compensation that combines base pay with equity and, in some cases, bonuses.
Grafana Labs Insights
What We Do
Grafana Labs provides an open and composable monitoring and observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are more than 5,000 Grafana Labs customers, including Bloomberg, Citigroup, Dell Technologies, Salesforce, and TomTom, and more than 20 million users of Grafana around the world. Grafana Labs helps companies manage their observability strategies with the LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise offerings, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo) as well as extensive enterprise data source plugins, dashboard management, alerting, reporting, and security.
Why Work With Us
Clear communication is vital in a remote-first company. We hold weekly team updates, monthly all-hands calls, co-located offsites, and annual events. We've enhanced hiring, onboarding, and training with a learning management tool and quarterly bootcamps. We offer 30 vacation days plus local holidays, with equal benefits for all employees globally.
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