[Hiring] Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Second Horizon @Grafana Labs

Role Description

At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. We recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise. As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context.

This system helps agents retrieve the right data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge without every agent builder having to maintain their own brittle context files. The principle is simple: the context system retrieves, agents decide, and data teams maintain the intelligence.

The new team is a mix of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires. We operate with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, both as individuals and as a team. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early – while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.

We’re looking for a Staff-level Backend Engineer to help build the first production services for this context layer management system. You will design and ship the core backend architecture that powers ingestion, context storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. This is an early-stage role on a high-autonomy team, so you should be comfortable working through ambiguity, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS. As the team matures, there’s a broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative.

Qualifications

• Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• AI experience with a practical mindset: Familiar with AI technologies and frameworks.
• Quick iteration and experimentation: Comfortable releasing prototypes and iterating.
• Proven initiative: Takes ownership and drives projects forward.
• Collaborative attitude: Communicates effectively and is open to feedback.
• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI.
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production.
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Requirements

• Build the core backend services: Design, implement, test, and operate the first services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability.
• Operate what you build: Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards.
• Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.
• Effective communication: Work in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment.
• Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the AI solutions developed.

Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture: A remote-only company with a culture of collaboration.
• Scaling Organization: Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth environment.
• Transparent Communication: 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.
• 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 and visible.
• Passionate People: Join a team of smart, supportive folks.
• In-Person onboarding: Thrive from day 1 with fellow new ‘Grafanistas’.
• Balance is Key: Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.