Staff Software Engineer - Data Sources Core Services | UK | 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. Staff Backend Engineer - Data Sources Core Services This role is available for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Sweden. The Opportunity: As a Staff Software Engineer in the Core Services Data Sources squad, you’ll take a leading role in the design and development of both internal cloud services and key user facing features. Grafana is an open-source visualization platform that helps users understand their systems and data through customizable dashboards and alerts. Within the Grafana department, the Data Sources group is responsible for connecting to and querying our vast library of data sources, as well as enabling a seamless plugin ecosystem and marketplace. Data source queries make up the majority of our request traffic and are a vital part of our product. The Core Services Data Sources squad specifically builds and maintains our querying service, data source connections, and other cross-cutting features for the group. Our mission is to deliver a robust querying experience supported by a reliable, scalable architecture. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. You'll have the opportunity to work across the Data Sources group and partner with other squads within the Grafana division to drive innovation and solve complex engineering challenges. What You'll Be Doing: • Enhancing the querying experience through improving how queries are transformed, routed, and delivered at scale • Influencing the design of our microservice architecture • Supporting the reliability, scalability, and operations of data sources in Grafana Cloud • Engineering new connection types to remote data sources • Collaborating with engineers and teams across the Grafana division • Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives • As we have embraced a remote-first approach and our engineering team is primarily remote, it is essential to possess strong communication skills and the ability to work independently. We provide support and hold regular meetings through video calls to ensure effective collaboration and alignment. We invest heavily in developer productivity. 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. 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. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro). What Makes You a Great Fit: • You are a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action • You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs • Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively • You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key. • You have professional experience as a backend engineer with expertise in cloud microservice architecture, systems design, Go, and Kubernetes (Typescript and React are a plus). • You are someone who is naturally curious, motivated to grow and thrives in a collaborative environment. • You enjoy working on complex solutions – Grafana is a highly technological solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and care deeply about their workflows. • You have experience working with AI/LLM-powered systems, such as building integrations with agentic workflows or improving developer efficiency with AI tools • Backend technologies: Go and familiarity with other backend languages • Configuration technologies: Jsonnet and Terraform • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes • Strong experience with designing and developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering • Solid experience with distributed systems • Familiarity with being on-call and performing operational/SRE tasks • Experience with the latest LLM models and workflows Bonus Points For: • Monitoring and observability: Familiarity with tools like Grafana, Prometheus or other observability platforms • Networking experience (DNS, SSH, SOCKS) • Frontend technologies: Typescript and React Compensation & Rewards: In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is £100,000 - £124,000. 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. 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.