Backend Engineer - Platform Stacks (Remote in Ireland)

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is a globally distributed, fully remote company with over 1,600 employees across 40+ countries, dedicated to open source observability solutions. Their flagship product, Grafana Cloud, is a scalable, fully managed observability platform trusted by 7,000+ customers and 35 million users worldwide, including prominent companies such as Microsoft, Bloomberg, and NVIDIA. The company is supported by esteemed investors and continuously fosters a culture of transparency, autonomy, and innovation.

Role Overview

The Backend Engineer for Platform Stacks is part of the Application Core Services group within the Foundations department. This team is responsible for critical systems that enable Grafana's business operations by building and maintaining the Internal Engineering Platform and managing workflows that support both customer-facing environments and internal processes.

The role requires developing and operating reliable, scalable systems for managing Grafana Cloud stacks — integrated environments including services like Mimir, Loki, and Tempo. These systems ensure consistent stack state across multiple platforms and cloud regions, providing customers with seamless and predictable service management.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and maintain reconciliation systems to track and correct discrepancies between desired and actual stack states.
• Coordinate with multiple teams to guarantee reliable stack lifecycle workflows and efficient deployments.
• Reduce operational complexity and enhance deployment processes for stack components and configurations.
• Support rollout of new cloud regions and cluster deployments, ensuring smooth onboarding of stacks.
• Improve incident management and recovery strategies related to stack misalignment and integration failures.
• Collaborate with product teams, infrastructure, customer support, and adjacent squads to align stack lifecycle initiatives.
• Contribute to technical roadmap, design discussions, operational procedures, and on-call improvements.
• Own production system behavior by enhancing monitoring, alerts, recovery procedures, and maintaining clear runbooks.

Candidate Profile

This position suits engineers passionate about building scalable, correct, and operationally clear software, comfortable working asynchronously in a fully remote environment. Candidates should be motivated by tackling complex stateful systems and reconciliation challenges and able to decompose complex lifecycle requirements into manageable modules.

The team encourages use of AI-assisted development tools to optimize design, implementation, testing, and operational workflows.

Experience & Skills Required

• Minimum one year of experience working fully remotely.
• Professional background in SaaS platforms and understanding of distributed systems concepts such as scalability, multi-tenancy, and high availability.
• Proficient in Golang for backend services and application development.
• Strong emphasis on developer and user experience with commitment to producing clean, well-tested, maintainable code.
• Experience contributing across all phases of project delivery, from brainstorming through to production launch.
• Ability to collaboratively work across teams to align with product and stakeholder needs.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes on cloud providers like AWS, GCP, or Azure, and exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools such as Helm, Terraform, or Jsonnet.
• Experience in blameless incident response and conducting post-incident reviews.

Desirable Qualifications

• Experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes control-plane mechanisms including operators and reconcilers.
• Familiarity with configuration and deployment tools such as Jsonnet/Tanka, Terraform, Flux, or Argo.
• Background in SaaS lifecycle components including provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, and plugin rollout.
• Experience managing incident responses involving state misalignment or cross-service failures.

Compensation & Benefits

For Ireland-based candidates, the salary band ranges between EUR 81,000 and EUR 102,000 annually, adjusted based on experience and skills. All positions include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), promoting shared ownership and alignment with company success. Compensation varies by country for applicants applying outside the listed locations.

• Fully 100% remote and global work culture.
• 30 days annual leave with 3 reserved Grafana Shutdown Days to encourage breaks.
• A highly transparent, innovation-focused workplace valuing autonomy and career growth.
• Inclusive environment committed to equal opportunity employment and diversity.
• In-person onboarding to ensure integration and support from day one.

Additional Information

Grafana Labs welcomes applicants from diverse backgrounds and identities, ensuring equal opportunities across all protected characteristics as defined by local laws. The company integrates AI tools thoughtfully in recruitment to enhance matching of candidate profiles to roles while maintaining manual review. Applicants' personal data use is governed by the company’s privacy policies.