[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer - Application Core Services, Stacks @Grafana Labs

Role Description

Application Core Services (AppCore) is a group within Platform, in the Foundations department. Foundations produces the Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) and partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams. Our team develops the essential systems driving Grafana's business operations. We utilize the grafana.com platform to engineer bespoke integrations and solutions that unify the diverse technical ecosystem of a modern software enterprise.

The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains. Our work includes:

• Maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation
• Automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract
• Integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts

This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales. We are looking for engineers who enjoy:

• Solving complex workflow and systems problems
• Improving reliability and developer experience
• Building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders

As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities and collaborate across teams beyond their immediate scope.

What You’ll Be Doing

The AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configuration. Our work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations. We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across:

• grafana.com
• Stack State Service (SSS)
• Hosted Grafana
• Cloud regions
• The underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure

When this domain works well, customers get reliable stack creation, safe configuration rollout, predictable migrations, and fewer manual operational interventions.

• Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend
• Collaborate across SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilient
• Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity
• Manage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configuration
• Support new region and cluster rollouts
• Improve incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment
• Partner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle work
• Contribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operations

You will help own the production behavior of the systems you build. That includes:

• Improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures
• Debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacks

There is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously. As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow, backed by a company-funded usage budget. 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.

What Makes You a Great Fit

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount. You will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy:

• Solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops
• Transforming ambiguous lifecycle requirements into explicit, modular solutions
• Breaking down complex systems work into safe, iterative increments

Some things you might be expected to do could include:

• Writing efficient, readable, and easy to maintain code
• Designing new microservices or systems
• Collaborating with teammates and other departments to reach consensus on proposed solutions
• Coordinating with product and UX when needed
• Responding to customer requests and feedback
• Participating in our follow-the-sun OnCall rotation
• Participating in team decisions, such as roadmap planning and prioritization

Requirements

• You have at least 1 year of fully remote work experience
• You have worked on a big SaaS platform and dealt with common distributed systems problems (e.g. scalability, multi-tenancy, data isolation, HA, …)
• Have professional experience with Golang and be willing to work across both backend service and application code
• Care deeply about developer and user experience and the quality of the products that you work on
• Have some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way
• You write clean, robust, well-tested software that other engineers can understand, operate, and maintain
• Can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve tight learning loops
• You are willing to work across teams and make your plans transparent
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews

Bonus Points For

• Experience with TypeScript/Node.js
• Experience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns, operators, reconcilers, or desired-state systems
• Experience with Jsonnet/Tanka, Terraform, Flux, Argo, or similar deployment/configuration tooling
• Experience working on SaaS provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, or customer lifecycle systems
• Experience with incident response involving configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service state mismatch

Compensation & Rewards

In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 164,490 - CAD 197,389. 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.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• Balance is Key

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.