Senior Backend Engineer | M (Archived) | VirtualInterview.ai

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.

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 applicants based in Spain, Germany, the UK or Sweden at this time.

The 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, optimize, and scale one of the industry’s most advanced metrics platforms.

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 idea 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 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 getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

What Makes You a Great Fit:

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 with being on-call and following the DevOps model

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

Familiarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.

Bonus Points For:

Experience working with Kubernetes

Experience working 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 just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)

Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn

Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

In Spain, the compensation range for this role is EUR 82,988 - EUR 99,586. 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: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization 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.

For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy.

Senior Backend Engineer | Mimir OSS | Spain | Remote

Job Description