Senior Backend Engineer - Grafana OSS Big Tent

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. Senior Backend Engineer, Grafana OSS Big Tent This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applications from the EST in Canada. The Opportunity: As a Senior Software Engineer in the OSS Big Tent squad, you will take a leading role in developing and enhancing a diverse portfolio of open source plugins that retrieve the data powering Grafana dashboards used by teams worldwide. Our team focuses on building new open source data source plugins, continuously improving existing ones and ensuring seamless customer experiences. A key aspect of this role is guaranteeing the smooth operation and reliability of our plugins in the Grafana Cloud, helping us deliver on our commitment to world-class observability tools. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. You'll have the opportunity to work across the Data Sources team and partner with other squads within the Grafana division to drive innovation and solve complex engineering challenges. As we continue on a growth trajectory, we are constantly evolving our ways of working to ensure they are scalable and adaptable to the needs of our team and users. What You'll Be Doing: • Some data source plugins we own: • Prometheus, Loki, Infinity, MySQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Zabbix, Github, Google Sheets, Zipkin, CSV and MQTT • A typical "day in the life" could include: • Building Grafana plugins to integrate third party services or databases into Grafana • Innovating our plugin system to allow for enhanced capabilities • Supporting the operations and reliability of our plugins in Grafana Cloud • Coming up with suggestions for process improvements • Providing technical support in customer escalations • Working closely with the rest of the Grafana Division What Makes You a Great Fit: • You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key. For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind and respectful. We value autonomy and enabling decisions over committees and red tape. We are a distributed team, working remotely, on a product that will be used by engineers all over the world – the ability to work on your own and ship working code is crucial. • You have solid professional experience as a Backend Engineer with expertise in Go and backend services. Some experience with frontend technologies is valued, as it helps bridge the gap between backend systems and user-facing features. • You have strong coding skills and operational experience; you were responsible for operating the software you have built. • You have experience participating in on-call rotations to support software in production, ensuring reliability and responding to incidents as needed. • You have a good understanding of a software development process that takes a user-centered approach. • You know how to transform ideas into working code, you are able to design a solution, get feedback and deliver large projects. • You are a self-driven individual who understands the power of feedback loops in making roadmap decisions and driving our product forward. • You are able to communicate the design decisions clearly in written and spoken English. • 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 in some or all of the following: • Backend technologies: Strong expertise in Go and familiarity with other backend languages is valued. • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes. • CI/CD and DevOps: Knowledge of building pipelines, automated testing and deployment strategies. • Monitoring and observability: Familiarity with tools like Grafana, Prometheus or other observability platforms. • Front-end technologies (nice to have): TypeScript, React, Re