Staff Backend Engineer - Observability Knowledge Graph 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 full-time remote position, and we're seeking candidates in the US or Canada. The Opportunity The Grafana Observability (O11y) group builds end-to-end observability solutions that span Application, Infrastructure, Database, Browser and Mobile observability. At the core of this experience is the Grafana Knowledge Graph—the platform that powers true full-stack observability across Grafana Cloud. The Knowledge Graph is a suite of distributed, multi-tenant microservices that connects signals across the stack and delivers automated Root Cause Insights by actively analyzing Metrics, Traces, and Logs stored in Grafana Cloud. These services process and store data across SQL, graph, and time-series databases and are designed for high availability and scale. Used by thousands of self-service customers and trusted by some of the world's largest organizations to monitor mission-critical infrastructure, the Knowledge Graph is a foundational platform at Grafana. As adoption continues to grow, our focus is on continuously improving performance, increasing reliability, and scaling efficiently—without compromising on quality. At Grafana, we value collective creativity and diverse perspectives. Every team member is encouraged to bring ideas forward and help shape a platform that our users depend on every day. 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. What will you be doing? • Work with your team to build and roll out new features, then use the results to iterate and improve. • Drive projects from initial ideation all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers. • Take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively • Maintain critical systems, and own their reliability, performance, and availability. • Be a part of your team's on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you're running. • Mentor and support other team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate with the team • Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase. • Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives What Makes You a Great Fit? • You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action. • You have strong coding skills and operational experience; you were responsible for operating the software you have built. • You have worked on a SaaS platform and dealt with common distributed systems problems (e.g. scalability, multi-tenancy, data isolation, HA, ...) • You have excellent written and spoken communication skills. You'll be working with your team mates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must. • You 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 suggestions. • You are pragmatic; you prioritize progress over perfection; you can handle ambiguity. • We use Java on the backend and deploy on AWS/Azure/GCP Clouds using Kubernetes. You must have programming experience in Java and experience with Kubernetes and any one of the cloud platforms. • You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind. Compensat