Senior Backend Engineer – Alerting | UK | Remote

Remote from: UK
Salary, yearly, GBP: 91,755 - 110,106
Department: Software Engineering
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 30 May 2026
Apply before: 30 Jun 2026
Experience level: Senior
Views / Applies: 26 / 4

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 its Alerting squad, working remotely in the UK. The role involves building distributed systems to scale alert ingestion, evaluation, and delivery for Grafana's open-source and cloud platforms. The engineer will take ownership of critical systems, mentor team members, and contribute to roadmap planning. This position requires experience with distributed systems, Go, and a customer-focused mindset. The role offers a competitive salary and the opportunity to work on a product trusted by major organizations worldwide.

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 involves designing and operating distributed systems at scale, requiring deep technical expertise and problem-solving skills. The responsibility of owning critical systems and mentoring others adds to the complexity.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary of £91,755-£110,106 per year translates to approximately $116,000-$139,000 USD, which is competitive for a senior backend role in the UK but below the typical US market range of $120,000-$200,000. The company offers remote work and equity, which may compensate for the lower base salary.

Key Skills

Go Distributed Systems Alerting Kubernetes Prometheus Grafana Cloud Infrastructure System Design Mentoring Open Source

Cover Letter Sample

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am excited to apply for the Senior Backend Engineer position on the Alerting squad at Grafana Labs. With extensive experience in building distributed systems and a passion for open-source software, I am drawn to Grafana's mission of making data accessible and actionable. In my previous role, I designed and scaled a high-throughput alerting system that processed over 500 events per second, similar to the challenges described in this position.

I thrive in autonomous, remote-first environments and have a proven track record of mentoring junior engineers and leading projects from conception to production. My expertise in Go and cloud-native technologies aligns perfectly with the technical requirements of this role.

I am particularly excited about the opportunity to work on a product that is trusted by major organizations for critical infrastructure monitoring. I look forward to contributing to the Grafana Alerting squad and helping shape the future of observability.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]

Possible Interview Questions

Describe your experience building and scaling distributed systems. Can you give an example of a system you designed that needed to handle high throughput?

At my previous company, I designed an alerting pipeline that processed over 1,000 alerts per second. We used Kafka for message queuing, microservices in Go, and Kubernetes for orchestration. I focused on efficient data partitioning and implementing backpressure mechanisms to ensure reliability during traffic spikes.

How do you approach mentoring junior engineers? Provide an example.

I believe in leading by example and providing structured guidance. For instance, I pair-programmed with a junior engineer on a complex feature, gradually reducing my involvement as they gained confidence. I also held weekly code reviews focused on best practices and system design principles.

Explain how you would design a system to unify Grafana-managed alerts and Prometheus-based alerts.

I would design a common alerting data model that abstracts the differences between Grafana and Prometheus alerts. A unified ingestion layer would normalize alerts into this model, and a configurable routing system would allow users to define delivery channels. The backend would store alert state in a distributed database for consistency and scalability.

How do you ensure the reliability and performance of a system you own?

I implement robust monitoring and alerting for the system itself, using metrics, logs, and traces. I set up SLIs and SLOs, and follow a practice of chaos engineering to identify weaknesses. Regular load testing and capacity planning help ensure performance under peak loads.

Describe a time when you had to balance technical debt with new feature development. How did you handle it?

In a previous role, our team had accumulated technical debt in the alerting pipeline. I proposed a plan to allocate 20% of each sprint to refactoring critical components while continuing feature work. This approach gradually improved system maintainability without stalling progress, and we tracked the reduction in incident response time as a metric.

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 the UK.

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 the UK, the compensation range for this role is GBP 91,755 – GBP 110,106. 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.

#LI-Remote

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