Staff Backend Engineer, Grafana Alerting

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, 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 are 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 is okay. If this role excites you, we would 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 applications from the UK.

The opportunity

The Grafana Alerting squad operates at the core of the Grafana open-source project, and our mission is to provide the most in-depth way to let users manage their alerts. The backend-focused team works closely with customers and the Grafana Cloud teams to make Alerting work on-prem and at infinite scale in Cloud. The team scope spans both Grafana Alerting and the SLOs product, so engineers get to work across two products that are deeply connected in how they help users detect and respond to problems.

Grafana Alerting is trusted by major organizations worldwide, monitoring essential medical devices and critical infrastructure. We thrive on collective creativity and diverse perspectives, every team member is encouraged to contribute ideas that shape our product into a dependable tool.

Our domain is quite large, so to get an idea of the kind of work we do, here are some projects we recently worked on:

• Build distributed systems to scale alert ingestion and delivery of Prometheus-based alerts
• Unify Alerting setup and delivery to work the same for Grafana and Prometheus-based alerts
• Build distributed systems to scale alert evaluation of Grafana-managed alerts, reaching over 500 evaluations per second in production.

What you will be doing

• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and our own decisions throughout the product lifecycle and work alongside the Product Managers, Designers and Engineers to define functional specs, design and deliver value to our users
• Drive projects from initial ideation all the way to operations once they are in production
• Exchange knowledge with another experienced Grafanistas and help grow the people around you, helping them as much as they help you
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• Be a part of the on-call rotation for the backend alerting team, owning the alerting stack with the goal of keep our services running reliably, adapting to the needs of our growing customer base
• Contribute to open source, as Grafana core is open source, and we encourage all our engineers to be active and visible within the community
• You are able to take on complex challenges and turn them into satisfying results for viewers
• You will work with other teams to deliver features that are used and loved by our customers

As we are remote-first and our team is spread across many different time zones around the globe, we will require you to have strong communciation and collaboration skills

What makes you a great fit

• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
• You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind.
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers needs
• Pragmatism: You are able to 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
• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You will be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must
• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, Java, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well
• Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer hands in a self-driven way
• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

Compensation and rewards

In the UK, the compensation range for this role is GBP 103,958 – GBP 124,750. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every employee a stake in our success.

Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different country, your salary will be adjusted accordingly.

Why you will thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture – As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open…