Staff Software Engineer - Platform, Application Core Services

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we're backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X. 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 opportunity and we would be interested in applicants located in Canadian time zones (EST + CST only at this time). Staff Software Engineer - Platform, Application Core Services Application Core Services (AppCore) builds the control plane behind Grafana Cloud, designing the systems that create, configure, and operate thousands of customer environments safely and reliably. Working at the intersection of product, platform, and operations, the team develops the services that power critical customer and internal workflows, from provisioning and cloud marketplace integrations to billing and customer lifecycle management. As Grafana Cloud continues to scale, we're solving complex distributed systems challenges around reliability, automation, and operational efficiency. We're looking for engineers who enjoy building large-scale backend systems, improving developer experience, and leading technical initiatives that have a direct impact on both our customers and the engineers building on our platform. As a remote-first, open source company, we value collaboration, ownership, and diverse perspectives, with opportunities to contribute across teams and to the broader OSS community. What You'll Be Doing: You'll help build and operate the control plane behind Grafana Cloud. The team owns the systems responsible for creating, configuring, reconciling, migrating, and operating customer stacks at scale. In this role you'll: • Design and build distributed backend systems that keep customer stack state consistent across Grafana Cloud. • Develop reconciliation and automation workflows that improve reliability, reduce operational complexity, and safely manage infrastructure changes. • Lead technical initiatives spanning multiple services and partner closely with Product, Infrastructure, Hosted Grafana, and adjacent platform teams. • Improve deployment workflows, regional expansion, rollout safety, and incident recovery across thousands of customer environments. • Own the production systems you build, including observability, operational tooling, on-call, and continuous reliability improvements. • As a remote-first team, we share ownership through a global follow-the-sun on-call rotation and invest heavily in AI-assisted development with access to modern coding tools and frontier models. What Makes You a Great Fit: We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer who enjoys solving complex distributed systems problems and leading technical work from idea to production. You'll likely be successful if you: • Have experience building and operating large-scale SaaS or cloud platforms. • Have strong backend engineering experience in Go or another systems language, and are comfortable learning new technologies. • Have experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code. • Enjoy solving problems around distributed systems, eventual consistency, stateful services, and system reliability. • Can independently lead projects, navigate ambiguity, and influence technical direction across teams. • Care about writing clean, maintainable software and improving the developer experience. • Have experience participating in production operations, incident response, and on-call. • Are comfortable working in a remote-first, highly collaborative environment. Bonus Points For: We'd especially love to hear from you if you have experience with: • Kubernetes operators, reconcilers, or control plane development. • Go and TypeScript/Node.js. • Terraform, Flux, Argo, Jsonnet, Tanka, or similar infrastructure