[Remote] Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry | USA | Remote

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs is a leading company in the observability cloud space, dedicated to open source and innovative solutions. They are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for their Adaptive Telemetry group, responsible for driving technical strategy, leading large projects, and ensuring the reliability and performance of critical systems.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions
• Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives
• Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable
• Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence
• Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives
• Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs
• Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning

Skills

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Strong systems-design instincts. 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
• Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (PrometheGrafana or equivalents)
• 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

Benefits

• Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.
• 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.
• You'll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
• 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.

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