Senior Engineering Manager, Grafana Backend

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. This is a remote position and we're considering candidates in the US or Canada (EST working hours preferred). The Opportunity: We are looking for an Engineering Manager to join the Grafana Backend team. Our managers take an active role in creating a thriving environment for our engineers; be it through removing blockers and impediments, facilitating cross-team collaboration and understanding, or by aiding the team in helping themselves by constantly improving and refining their working practices, you are the glue to make our deliverables happen. You'll be responsible for managing a team of distributed engineers working across a variety of systems and helping them to perform at their best. In Grafana Backend, our mission is to evolve the backend of the Grafana visualization product by architecting and delivering an exceptional Grafana core platform that supports our high demand service. We want users and agents to be able to leverage Grafana to observe their infrastructure as well as the lifecycle of their software in a composable and efficient fashion. The majority of our work is on OSS Grafana, but we also work closely with customers of our commercial offerings. Our main goal is to deliver on the application platform which will unlock multi-tenancy in Grafana to meet our growing demand. We strive to deeply understand developers, both internal and those who are part of our larger community. We play an active role in research to help deliver the best developer experience. Close collaboration with Product, Docs and Customer Experience is something you will regularly be engaging in. What You'll Be Doing: This is not an exhaustive list, and we know that people can have a wealth of knowledge in their individual backgrounds. A list of some of the things we think would be ideal in this role are: • The core focus of the role is people. Technical skills are desirable in order to understand some of our stack and manage a highly technical team (we primarily work with Go on back-end development). • You have a strong software engineering background and are capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenge teams to arrive at strong technical decisions together. The app platform area that this individual would support is highly technical, so a strong technical foundation is essential for success • Delivery is another part of your responsibilities. You are able to work with your team to set milestones, clearly communicate delivery timelines and help remove impediments. • You will work closely with stakeholders and product managers to ensure the product roadmap is defined and up-to-date. You collaborate with others to ensure the product direction aligns with our company mission and define OKRs to demonstrate that. • You focus on quality above speed of delivery while encouraging a short feedback cycle and experimentation. • You are comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision making, be it technical or product focussed. • While you're great with people and adept at managing relationships, you still keep up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts in order to maintain and enhance your understanding of the challenges your teams face. We 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 friction. We 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). What Mak