About this role.
Grafana Labs is hiring a remote Backend Engineer for its AppCore Stacks squad to build and operate control-plane services for Grafana Cloud stack lifecycle management. The role centers on reconciliation systems, desired-state workflows, configuration rollouts, migrations, and operational reliability across distributed services. The engineer will use Go, work with Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code tooling, and participate in incident response and a follow-the-sun OnCall rotation. This is a high-ownership role requiring asynchronous collaboration across product, platform, infrastructure, support, and adjacent engineering teams. Candidates must be located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, or Sweden.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader EU market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I would define a canonical desired-state model, collect observable actual state from each dependent system, and compare them through idempotent reconciliation steps. Each action would have clear ownership, retry behavior, backoff, audit logs, and safeguards to prevent unsafe or repeated changes. I would also expose drift metrics, reconciliation status, and actionable alerts so operators can distinguish transient failures from persistent inconsistencies.
I would use versioned configuration, validation before deployment, progressive rollout cohorts, and an explicit rollback mechanism. I would begin with internal or low-risk environments, monitor health and customer-impact signals, then expand only when success criteria are met. The rollout should be observable end to end and resilient to partial failures or regions progressing at different speeds.
I focus on clear interfaces, context-aware cancellation, bounded concurrency, structured logging, metrics, and robust error classification. Control-plane actions should be idempotent and durable enough to resume after restarts, while external API calls need timeouts, retries, and rate-limit handling. Thorough unit, integration, and failure-mode testing is important because these services often coordinate multiple systems.
I would first establish impact, stabilize the system, and use traces, logs, metrics, and recent deployment history to map where state diverged. I would identify whether automated reconciliation can safely remediate the issue or whether a controlled manual intervention is required. After recovery, I would contribute to a blameless review with concrete improvements such as better detection, safer retries, clearer runbooks, or reduced coupling.
I write concise design documents that state the problem, assumptions, options, risks, decision criteria, and recommended path. I make ownership boundaries and operational implications explicit, invite feedback early, and record final decisions so teams in different time zones can proceed confidently. For high-impact changes, I pair written communication with targeted sync discussions and clear rollout updates.
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’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.
Backend Engineer – Platform – Stacks
This role is available for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Sweden.
The Opportunity:
Application Core Services (AppCore) is a group within Platform, in the Foundations department. Foundations produces the Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) and partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams. Our team develops the essential systems driving Grafana’s business operations. We utilize the grafana.com platform to engineer bespoke integrations and solutions that unify the diverse technical ecosystem of a modern software enterprise.
The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains. Our work includes maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation, automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract, integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts.
This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales. We are looking for engineers who enjoy solving complex workflow and systems problems, improving reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders.
As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities and collaborate across teams beyond their immediate scope.
What You’ll Be Doing:
The AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configuration.
Our work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations. We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across grafana.com, Stack State Service (SSS), Hosted Grafana, cloud regions, and the underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure. When this domain works well, customers get reliable stack creation, safe configuration rollout, predictable migrations, and fewer manual operational interventions.
- Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend, to track desired stack state, detect and repair drift across stack templates, grafana.com state, Hosted Grafana, and actual customer stack configuration
- Collaborate across SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilient
- Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity (e.g., aiming for single PR regional SSS deployment) and contributing to the Stack Config Reconciliation project
- Manage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configuration
- Support new region and cluster rollouts, including the operational paths required to bring stacks online safely in new Grafana Cloud regions
- Improve incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment, reconciliation failures, plugin rollout issues, and Hosted Grafana integration failures
- Partner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle work
- Contribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operations
- You will help own the production behavior of the systems you build. That includes improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures. You should be comfortable debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacks
What Makes You a Great Fit:
At Grafana, we actively embrace AI-assisted and agentic development practices, integrating these technologies into both our engineering workflows and the systems we deliver. We encourage our engineers to thoughtfully leverage AI tools to enhance every stage of the lifecycle, from design and implementation to testing, documentation, and operations. We also look for strategic opportunities to embed agentic capabilities within our services to eliminate toil, bolster reliability, and ensure that complex customer workflows remain resilient and safe.
We are seeking a Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount. As a remote-first organization, you should be comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones and taking full ownership of the critical systems powering Grafana Cloud. Our team is small and operates with a high degree of independence; you will be expected to lead major projects, coordinate across service boundaries, and help define the technical direction for our domain.
You will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops. We value engineers who can take ambiguous lifecycle requirements and transform them into explicit, modular solutions. You should be adept at breaking down complex systems work into safe, iterative increments while clearly communicating technical tradeoffs to both internal stakeholders and adjacent product teams.
Some things you might be expected to do could include:
- Writing efficient, readable, and easy to maintain code
- Implementing new microservices or systems
- Collaborating with teammates and other departments to reach consensus on proposed solutions
- Coordinating with product and UX when needed
- Responding to customer requests and feedback
- When ready, participating in our follow-the-sun OnCall rotation
- Participating in team decisions, such as roadmap planning and prioritization
Requirements:
- You have at least 1 year of fully remote work experience
- You have some experience working on a SaaS platform and are familiar with common distributed systems concepts (e.g., scalability, multi-tenancy, HA).
- Have professional experience with Golang and be willing to work across both backend service and application code
- Care deeply about developer and user experience and the quality of the products that you work on
- Have some experience contributing to the delivery of projects, from initial brainstorming to shipping a product to the customer.
- You write clean, well-tested software that other engineers can understand, operate, and maintain
- Can take on well-defined tasks, break them down, and execute iteratively to deliver working solutions and gather feedback.
- You are willing to collaborate across teams and ensure your work is aligned with the needs of other squads and external stakeholders.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and exposure to infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.).
- Experience participating in blameless incident response and contributing to post-incident reviews.
Bonus Points For:
- Experience with TypeScript/Node.js
- Experience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns, operators, reconcilers, or desired-state systems
- Experience with Jsonnet/Tanka, Terraform, Flux, Argo, or similar deployment/configuration tooling
- Experience working on SaaS provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, or customer lifecycle systems
- Experience with incident response involving configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service state mismatch
Compensation & Rewards:
In Ireland the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 81,000 – EUR 102,000. 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: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation 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
For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy.
Upload your resume now
- To unlock remote work opportunities and be discovered by global employers.
This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.
