Staff Backend Engineer - Analytics | US | Remote

Grafana Labs builds open-source observability tools and Grafana Cloud, a managed observability platform for organizations worldwide. The Staff Backend Engineer will design and ship core backend services for an AI-native context layer management system, including ingestion, storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. The role will also establish a scalable multi-tenant SaaS foundation, operate production services, and contribute to the architecture and technical direction of the new product area.

Responsibilities:

• Build the core backend services: Design, implement, test, and operate the first services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings
• Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production
• Operate what you build: Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability
• Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area
• Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams
• Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows

Requirements:

• Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems
• You're a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making UI design decisions with minimal supervision
• You're familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory
• You're comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset
• You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions
• You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined
• You communicate effectively with your peers
• You're open to feedback, and you bring a solutions-oriented mindset to the table
• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
• Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi‑agent workflows
• Experience as a data analyst or work with data platforms (e.g., Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, Snowflake, DataBricks)
• Experience building tools for data engineering