Senior Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry - Grafana Labs

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.

The Databases department owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. We offer our databases as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud, and additionally as on-premise solutions with Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Grafana Enterprise Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Traces. They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and running on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (GCP, Azure, AWS).

Adaptive Telemetry Group

The Adaptive Telemetry group, part of the Databases department, has the mission of ensuring that all telemetry stored in our databases is worthy of attention. The group has already developed Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs and is now in the path of iterating them while expanding the same vision to other telemetry signals These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly.

An Adaptive Telemetry engineer has various work streams. They likely are engaged in a larger project with another engineer, as well as mixing in some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production. They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems.

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 new perspective to the software. Our tech stack is mostly made up of services written in Go, running on multiple Kubernetes clusters that leverage Cloud object storage.

What will you 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.

• 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 follow-the-sun 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 are we looking for in you? 

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 squad. 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, C, 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

• Some experience working with microservices architectures and distributed systems.

• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

Nice to haves:

• Experience working with Kubernetes

• Experience working with Kafka

• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)

• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code