Staff Backend Engineer - Session Replay | USA | Remote at Grafanalabs

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). 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 position. We are looking for candidates in the EST or CT timezone in the United States or Canada. The Opportunity: The Session Replay squad is building a new Grafana Cloud product that helps our customers to understand what users actually experienced when something goes wrong. Session Replay connects frontend signals (errors, performance, synthetic checks) to concrete session-level evidence, enabling faster and more confident investigation of production issues. This team works at the intersection of: • frontend observability, • backend data processing and storage at scale, • debugging workflows across products, • privacy and access control, • performance and cost constraints at scale. Session Replay is still early, which means you’ll help shape both what we build and how it fits into Grafana Cloud. A key part of our next phase is evolving the backend architecture of capturing sessions, including a migration toward columnar/analytical solution as a primary storage and query engine for high-volume session data. 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 new perspective to the software. We are looking for Staff Software Engineers who are passionate about working with data and providing seamless experiences for our customers to join our growing team! Our stack is Golang, Typescript and React, but we build tools for people using many other stacks. What you'll be doing: As a Staff Software Engineer, you will operate as a technical leader and systems thinker, driving both product direction and architectural evolution, specifically, you will: • Own end-to-end technical direction for Session Replay, spanning frontend, backend, and data systems • Drive the evolution of our backend architecture, including: • Designing systems around columnar/analytical data storage for large-scale session data • Defining data models, ingestion pipelines, and query patterns • Lead the design of investigation workflows, connecting replay with logs, metrics, traces and other telemetry across Grafana Cloud • Make high-leverage architectural decisions that impact multiple teams and products • Partner with teams across Grafana (Frontend Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, Core Grafana) to build cohesive cross-product experiences • Improve engineering standards, patterns, and operational practices within the team • Mentor engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team Technologies you'll work with: • Go (backend services and APIs) • Columnar/Analytical data storage (core data storage and querying) • Object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage) and MySQL • TypeScript / React (user-facing workflows) • Grafana ecosystem (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, etc.) What Makes You a Great Fit: • You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key. • For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful. We operate by consensus. You can contribute to a discussion, disagree constructively, and commit to the team’s decision. You are able to communicate design decisions clearly in written and spoken English. • Ability to reason about data-intensive systems (ingestion, storage, querying, cost trade-offs) • You are comfortable owning features in ambiguous problem spaces. We are a small team, working remotely, on a product that will be used by engineers all over the world – the ability to work on your own is crucial. • You have a good understanding of a software development process that takes a user-centered approach. You easily build an understanding of the users’ context and goals which will help you build the right solution with the maximum value. • You enjoy working on complex solutions – Grafana is a highly technological solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and who care deeply about their workflows. You value code maintainability, readability & automation. Bonus Points For: • Experience with columnar/analytical databases • Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc.). • Experience building debugging or developer-focused tools. • Familiarity with privacy, security, and access control in data-heavy systems • Experience working on performance-sensitive systems (large datasets, real-time queries, session data) Compensation & Rewards: In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 174,986 - USD 218,733. 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. *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. *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: 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. 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 For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy.