Senior Backend Engineer - Mimir Remote

United Kingdom (Remote)

Grafana Labs is a remote‑first, open‑source powerhouse. With more than 20M users worldwide, Grafana is used to monitor everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps, and its dashboards have been seen at NASA launches, Minecraft HQs, Wimbledon, and the Tour de France. The company helps over 3,000 companies – including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay – manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self‑managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack.

Both options feature scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

We’re scaling fast while staying true to our open‑source legacy, global collaborative culture, and 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 for you to raise your hand for a truly career‑defining opportunity.

As a Mimir Engineer you’ll join one of two sub‑squads – Ingest or Query – that together maintain the open‑source Grafana Mimir OSS project and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across three major cloud providers. This role offers the opportunity to work on large‑scale, high‑performance distributed systems where efficiency, resilience, and reliability are essential to keeping our metrics offerings competitive and smooth at massive volumes.

Mimir engineers work across a variety of streams. You’ll typically collaborate with another engineer on a larger project while also driving performance and reliability improvements identified from operating the system in production. In this role, you’ll write and review PRs and design documents, help guide automated release rollouts, and participate in the on‑call rotation for the systems you own. This is a chance to directly shape, optimise, and scale one of the industry’s most advanced metrics platforms.

• Take an active role in influencing the 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 idea all the way to operation once they are 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 follow‑the‑sun on‑call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
• 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 by getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

• Pragmatism:
  You can take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops, delivering MVPs and iterating based on data and feedback
• Collaboration and communication:
  The smallest unit we have is a squad. Good communication skills are a must in a fully remote setup
• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred, but Python, C, C++, Rust or similar also acceptable)
• Some experience delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self‑driven way
• Some experience developing software that runs in the Cloud or in systems engineering
• Some experience being on‑call and following a Dev Ops model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems, knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug a problem

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience with queue systems (e.g., the Kafka protocol)
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on‑call for your team at a previous employer or with hobby/homelab projects)
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code