Senior Backend Engineer – Alerting | Sweden | Remote

Remote from: Sweden
Salary, yearly, SEK: 775,444 - 930,533
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 30 May 2026
Apply before: 30 Jun 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 18 / 0

About company

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs supports organizations’ monitoring, visualization and observability goals. 750,000+ active installations

Internet
2014

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

Grafana Labs is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer for their Alerting squad, which is core to the Grafana open-source project. The role involves building distributed systems for alert ingestion, evaluation, and delivery at scale. You'll drive projects from ideation to operations, mentor team members, and participate in on-call rotations. The company is fully remote with a global team, and they value autonomy, collaboration, and customer focus. This is a remote opportunity based in Sweden.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight The role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, scalability, and ownership of critical systems, along with mentoring and cross-team collaboration, which places it at a high difficulty level.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range in SEK converts to approximately $75,000-$90,000 USD, which is below the US market median for senior backend engineers. However, considering the remote-first culture and Swedish location, the compensation may be aligned with local market rates.

Key Skills

Backend Engineering Distributed Systems Go Alerting Prometheus Grafana Cloud Infrastructure Open Source Scalability System Design

Cover Letter Sample

I am writing to express my strong interest in the Senior Backend Engineer - Alerting position at Grafana Labs. With extensive experience in building distributed systems and a passion for open-source software, I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to Grafana's Alerting squad.

My background includes designing and operating large-scale systems, ensuring high availability and performance. I have a proven track record of driving projects from ideation to production, and I thrive in collaborative, remote-first environments.

I am particularly drawn to Grafana's mission of making observability accessible and its open-source culture. I look forward to the chance to mentor team members and contribute to a product that is trusted by major organizations worldwide.

Thank you for considering my application. I am eager to discuss how my skills and experience align with the goals of Grafana Labs.

Possible Interview Questions

Describe your experience building distributed systems for alerting or monitoring. What challenges did you face with scalability and how did you overcome them?

I have worked on a distributed alerting system that processed millions of events per second. We faced challenges with latency and resource contention. To overcome this, we implemented a sharded architecture with consistent hashing and used a message queue to decouple ingestion from evaluation. We also optimized the alert evaluation engine to reduce CPU usage and memory allocation.

How do you approach designing a system for high availability and reliability? Can you give an example of a system you built that met strict SLA requirements?

For a critical alerting service, we designed for redundancy across multiple availability zones, used leader election for failover, and implemented circuit breakers to handle downstream failures. We also set up comprehensive monitoring and alerting for the system itself, with automated rollback procedures. The system achieved 99.99% uptime over a year.

Grafana Alerting is an open-source project. How have you contributed to open source in the past, and what do you think is important for maintaining a healthy open-source community?

I have contributed to several open-source projects by submitting bug fixes, writing documentation, and reviewing pull requests. I believe clear communication, responsive maintainers, and a welcoming environment are key. It's important to encourage contributions from diverse backgrounds and provide clear guidelines for new contributors.

Walk me through a project where you had to mentor a junior engineer. How did you approach the mentorship and what was the outcome?

I paired with a junior engineer on a feature to add support for custom alert templates. I started by explaining the architecture and then let them write the initial implementation while I reviewed and provided feedback. We had regular check-ins to discuss challenges. The engineer successfully delivered the feature and later became a go-to person for that component.

Explain your experience with on-call rotations and incident response. How do you ensure that systems remain reliable under your ownership?

I have been part of an on-call rotation for a distributed system, handling incidents ranging from minor bugs to major outages. I believe in proactive monitoring, runbooks, and postmortems. I also advocate for chaos engineering to test system resilience. To ensure reliability, I focus on reducing toil through automation and improving observability.

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.

Senior Backend Engineer, Alerting

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applications from Sweden.

The Opportunity:

The Grafana Alerting squad operates at the core of the Grafana open-source project (link), 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.

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.

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.

What You’ll Be Doing:

Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
Work with your team to deliver 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
Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the 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 of a large distributed system

As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

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’ll 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’s 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 & Rewards:

In Sweden, the compensation range for this role is SEK 775,444 – SEK 930,533. 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 team member ownership in Grafana Labs’ success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

Why You’ll 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 decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
In-Person onboarding – We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
Balance is Key – We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.

Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

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