[Hiring] Senior Backend Engineer - Observability Ingest - Kubernetes Operator/Helm Chart @Grafana Labs

Role Description

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.

The Grafana Cloud Observability department is focused on enabling developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure in any environment by providing tools to instrument their code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud and visualize and explore it.

In this role, you will be part of the Ingest team that develops the software that helps our users to get Grafana's observability stack up and running and keep it working over time. We build and maintain the configuration and deployment tooling that bridges the gap between "I want observability" and "I have observability." To achieve this we are responsible for projects like the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart, Fleet Management, and the Instrumentation Hub.

If you care deeply about developer experience, love the challenge of making complex distributed systems approachable, and want your work to have a direct, visible impact on thousands of users, this role is for you.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Develop and maintain the tooling that powers the ability of our customers to deploy and operate the tooling to ingest observability data into the Grafana stack.
• Design, build and maintain user-facing tools that support the deployment, configuration and operation of Grafana Alloy, the OpenTelemetry Collector, and related components.
• Own and evolve our Helm chart ecosystem run on more than 10k clusters and 300k nodes, writing charts that are robust, well-tested, and a pleasure for users to use.
• Build and maintain tooling that works across platforms: Kubernetes-first, but rock-solid on Linux, Windows, and macOS, too.
• Support infrastructure-as-code integrations using ArgoCD, Terraform, Flux, and other GitOps utilities.
• Collaborate closely with support, product, and field engineering to understand real customer pain points and translate them into durable tool improvements.
• Work in the open: communicate progress transparently, review peers' code thoughtfully, and help raise the technical bar for the whole team.
• Contribute upstream to open source projects including Grafana Alloy, OpenTelemetry, and Helm community charts.
• Represent Grafana Labs in meetups, conferences, and social media forums.

Qualifications

• 4 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least one major language (Go preferred; Python, Rust, and others welcome).
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience: deploying, operating, and debugging workloads in production environments, including familiarity with Helm and the Kubernetes resource model.
• Experience building or maintaining tooling for external users or customers - you've thought carefully about API/UX design, backward compatibility, and upgrade paths.
• Comfortable writing and maintaining automated tests at multiple levels - unit, integration, and end-to-end.

Bonus Points For

• Direct experience with Grafana Alloy or the OpenTelemetry Collector - configuration, pipeline design, or contributing upstream.
• Experience authoring or maintaining Helm charts, especially in a community or production context.
• Experience with GitOps tooling, including Terraform, ArgoCD, or Flux.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).
• Experience building or contributing to developer-facing CLIs or configuration tooling.
• Familiarity with the broader Grafana ecosystem: Loki, Mimir, Tempo, or Pyroscope.
• A history of open source contributions with evidence of community collaboration.

Benefits

• 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.

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.