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Staff Backend Engineer – Grafana Alerting | UK | Remote

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Remote from
UK
Salary
GBP 103,958–124,750 / yr
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
29 Nov 2026
Listing views
20
Application actions
1
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AI Summary

The role, at a glance.

Grafana Labs is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to build and operate Grafana Alerting and SLO capabilities for its observability platform. The role centers on scalable distributed systems for alert ingestion, delivery, and evaluation, including high-volume cloud production workloads. The engineer will own services through design, implementation, operations, reliability work, and on-call rotation while mentoring teammates and influencing product direction. Strong software engineering experience, cloud or systems engineering exposure, independent execution, and effective remote collaboration are essential. The position is remote for applicants based in the United Kingdom.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

4/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

5/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

4/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThis is a staff-level role involving mission-critical distributed systems, production ownership, alerting reliability, and technical leadership. The engineer must make sound architectural decisions while balancing customer needs, operational demands, and iterative product delivery.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader UK market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Market rate
£114,354
UK market range (per year)£100k–£135k
AI insightThe yearly pay period is inferred from the job context; it was not explicitly stated by the employer. The employer discloses a GBP 103,958–124,750 compensation range. The yearly cadence is inferred from the size and context of the UK staff-level engineering range, as the posting does not explicitly state a pay period. A reasonable estimated UK market range for a remote staff backend engineer with distributed-systems ownership is GBP 100,000–135,000 per year.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you design an alert-evaluation service that must scale while maintaining predictable latency and reliability?

I would start by defining throughput, latency, durability, and availability targets. I would partition evaluation workloads by tenant or rule group, use durable queues where asynchronous processing is appropriate, make workers horizontally scalable, and instrument the full path with metrics, logs, and traces. I would also plan for retries, idempotency, backpressure, graceful degradation, and clear operational runbooks.

Describe a time you improved the reliability of a production backend system.

I would explain the original failure mode, how I used production signals and incident analysis to identify contributing factors, and the corrective changes I delivered. A strong example would include prevention measures such as timeouts, circuit breaking, capacity controls, better observability, automated testing, and a measurable reduction in incidents or recovery time.

How do you approach operating services that participate in an on-call rotation?

I treat operability as a design requirement rather than post-launch work. Before releasing a service, I ensure it has actionable alerts, dashboards, documented dependencies, sensible defaults, rollback procedures, and ownership boundaries. After incidents, I favor blameless reviews that result in prioritized engineering improvements rather than relying on manual intervention.

How would you make a technical decision when requirements are incomplete and several engineering approaches are viable?

I would clarify the customer problem, identify constraints and success measures, then document a small set of options with their risks and operational costs. I would seek input from relevant engineers and stakeholders, choose the simplest approach that satisfies current needs, and use milestones or experiments to validate assumptions early. I would communicate the decision and revisit it if evidence changes.

What practices help you collaborate effectively in a fully remote engineering organization?

I communicate decisions and context asynchronously in written form, use design documents to invite early feedback, and keep discussions focused on outcomes and trade-offs. I make progress visible, raise risks early, and use synchronous meetings for issues that benefit from rapid alignment. I also create space for mentoring and knowledge sharing so remote teammates can contribute confidently.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
Opportunity details

About this role.

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.

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. The team’s 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.

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 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 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.

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