Staff Backend Engineer (Application Core Services, Stacks)

Application Core Services (AppCore) partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams to deliver reliable internal and customer-facing systems that power critical parts of the Grafana business. We build on the grafana.Com platform to create custom solutions and integrations across the many systems that support a modern software companyThe team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domainsOur work includes maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation, automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract, integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accountsThis is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scalesThe AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configurationOur work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations. We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across grafana.Com, Stack State Service (SSS), Hosted Grafana, cloud regions, and the underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure. When this domain works well, customers get reliable stack creation, safe configuration rollout, predictable migrations, and fewer manual operational interventionsDesign, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend, to track desired stack state, detect and repair drift across stack templates, grafana.Com state, Hosted Grafana, and actual customer stack configurationCollaborate across SSS, grafana.Com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilientImprove operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity (e.G., aiming for single PR regional SSS deployment) and contributing to the Stack Config Reconciliation projectManage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configurationSupport new region and cluster rollouts, including the operational paths required to bring stacks online safely in new Grafana Cloud regionsImprove incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment, reconciliation failures, plugin rollout issues, and Hosted Grafana integration failuresPartner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle workContribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operationsYou will help own the production behavior of the systems you build. That includes improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures. You should be comfortable debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacksOf course, there is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously. As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day. You will work closely with counterparts in other regions to provide balanced coverage and shared ownershipWe 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 frictionWe 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)Our team is small and operates with a high degree of independence;
you will be expected tolead major projects, coordinate across service boundaries, and help define the technical direction for our domainWriting efficient, readable, and easy to maintain codeDesigning new microservices or systemsCollaborating with teammates and other departments to reach consensus on proposed solutionsCoordinating with product and UX when neededResponding to customer requests and feedbackWhen ready, participating in our follow-the-sun OnCall rotationParticipating in team decisions, such as roadmap planning and prioritizationBenefits
Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each yearHealthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and IndiaRetirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and GermanyProfessional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learnedWork location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working spaceChoice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three yearsMindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainersGlobal Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialistsPaid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoptionWe are looking for engineers who enjoy solving complex workflow and systems problems, improving reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount. As a remote-first organization, you should be comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones and taking full ownership of the critical systems powering Grafana CloudYou should be adept at breaking down complex systems work into safe, iterative increments while clearly communicating technical tradeoffs to both internal stakeholders and adjacent product teamsYou will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops. We value engineers who can take ambiguous lifecycle requirements and transform them into explicit, modular solutionsExperience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviewsHave professional experience with Golang and be willing to work across both backend service and application codeCan take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve tight learning loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and then progress iterativelyYou write clean, robust, well-tested software that other engineers can understand, operate, and maintainCare deeply about developer and user experience and the quality of the products that you work onHave some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, and brainstorming ideas to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven wayYou are willing to work across teams. Your work has to be aligned with the needs of other squads and external stakeholders. You make your plans transparent, bring stakeholders on board, and are open to feedback and suggestionsStrong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)You have worked on a big SaaS platform and dealt with common distributed systems problems (e.G. scalability, multi-tenancy, data isolation, HA, …)You have at least 1 year of fully remote work experienceHave experience with mentoring junior engineers in a collaborative but asynchronous environmentExperience with TypeScript/Node.JsExperience with Jsonnet/Tanka, Terraform, Flux, Argo, or similar deployment/configuration toolingExperience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns, operators, reconcilers, or desired-state systemsExperience working on SaaS provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, or customer lifecycle systemsExperience with incident response involving configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service state mismatch.
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