Senior Backend Software Engineer - Databases - Loki Ingest | Germany | Remote

Grafana Labs is a remote‑first, open‑source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open‑source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 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 featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

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.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer – Databases – Loki Ingest based in Spain, Germany, the UK or Sweden. This is a remote‑first role with opportunities across the EMEA region.

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

The Databases team owns the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. Our databases are OSS projects that we also offer as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud, and as an on‑premise solution. They are multi‑tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and running on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (GCP, Azure, AWS).

We also have engineers working on Prometheus, Grafana Agent, Mimir proxies, and Open Telemetry.

• 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 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 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

• 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 can 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, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well
• Some experience 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 with systems engineering
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

• Experience working with Kubernetes and/or Docker
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including…