# Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | US | Remote

**Company**: Grafana Labs
**Location**: United States (Remote)
**Work arrangement**: remote
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $154,445 - $185,334
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/grafanalabs/jobs/6206556004?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_ab97d717-02e

## Description

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for their general-purpose data platform.

The Opportunity: 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 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.

Responsibilities:

- Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: Design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats.

- Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.

- Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.

- Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production.

- Operate what you build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.

- Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area.

- Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams.

- Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

Requirements:

- Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.

- AI experience with a practical mindset: You’re familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory.

- Quick iteration and experimentation: You’re comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.

- Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions.

- Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with your peers.

- Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines.

- Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust.

- Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.

- Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).

- Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Nice to Have:

- Experience building distributed query engines.

- Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes.

- Experience building tools for data engineering.

Compensation & Rewards: In the US, the Base compensation range for this role is $154,445 - $185,334.

Benefits:

- 100% Remote, Global Culture

- Scaling Organization

- Transparent Communication

- Innovation-Driven

- Open Source Roots

- Empowered Teams

- Career Growth Pathways

- Approachable Leadership

- Passionate People

- In-Person onboarding

- Balance is Key

## Skills

### Required
- distributed systems
- query engines
- golang
- C++
- Rust
- cloud-native environments
- observability tools

### Nice to have
- distributed query engines
- data warehouses
- data lakes
- data engineering

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Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/grafanalabs/jobs/6206556004?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)