Staff Backend Engineer - Alerting (UK, Remote)

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs powers the open observability cloud and is driven by open source principles, open standards, ecosystems, and culture. Grafana Cloud is a scalable, fully managed observability platform enhanced with practical AI features that help organizations analyze and act on diverse data streams swiftly. Trusted by over 7,000 customers globally, including prominent companies like Microsoft and Bloomberg, Grafana Labs supports reliability, speeding incident resolution and optimizing telemetry costs. The company operates fully remotely with more than 1,600 members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors.

Role Overview

The Staff Backend Engineer will join the Grafana Alerting team, which is integral to the open-source Grafana project. Tasked with building backend systems that support alert management at scale, this role collaborates closely with customers and Grafana Cloud teams to develop solutions that function in both on-premises and cloud environments.

Key Projects and Work

• Develop distributed architectures to enhance alert ingestion and delivery for Prometheus alerts.
• Standardize alert configuration and delivery mechanisms across Grafana and Prometheus alerts.
• Scale alert evaluation for Grafana-managed alerts reaching high throughput levels (over 500 evaluations per second).

Primary Responsibilities

• Contribute actively to roadmap planning and align personal career goals.
• Collaborate with teammates to create, release, and refine new features based on usage and feedback.
• Lead projects from concept through customer deployment and ongoing maintenance.
• Support the open-source community by contributing beyond immediate team projects.
• Design, develop, operate, and maintain critical backend services, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability.
• Participate in on-call rotations to support live services.
• Mentor fellow engineers and engage in design discussions.
• Continuously expand knowledge on the cloud platform, large distributed codebases, and customer needs.

Candidate Profile

• Proactive self-starter with a customer-first mindset.
• Strong desire to build user-centric, intuitive products.
• Pragmatic in solving complex challenges by delivering iterative, modular solutions with rapid feedback cycles.
• Excellent communication skills suitable for a fully remote team.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language, preferably Go; familiarity with Python, Java, C++, or Rust is advantageous.
• Experience driving projects independently from requirements to delivery.
• Background in cloud-based software development or systems engineering.
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, and high-performance code.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary range in the UK: GBP 103,958 - GBP 124,750, determined by experience and skills.
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) to ensure employee ownership in company growth.
• Country-specific pay ranges and benefits discussed during recruitment for applicants outside the UK.
• Fully remote work environment with a global, collaborative culture.
• Comprehensive career development pathways and transparent leadership.
• 30 annual leave days per year, including 3 mandatory Grafana Shutdown Days for team-wide breaks; compliant with local laws.
• In-person onboarding to integrate new hires.

Equal Opportunity

Grafana Labs is committed to diversity and inclusion, welcoming applicants from all backgrounds and providing an equitable workplace.

Additional Information

The role requires strong independent work habits and remote communication skills. Grafana Labs may use AI-assisted recruitment tools to align candidate information with job requirements but performs manual review as well.