Opportunity

Backend Engineer at Grafana Labs - Go & Distributed Systems in Columbus

Location Columbus
Company Grafana Labs
Source jobicy
Posted 2026-10-30 08:20:05

Career & Market Insight

Compensation vs. Market: At EUR 94,025–112,830 in Spain, this range is strong for a senior backend engineer role — roughly 20–30% above typical Spanish market rates for distributed systems engineers. The inclusion of RSUs at a VC-backed, late-stage company (Sequoia, Lightspeed) adds meaningful equity upside if an IPO or acquisition occurs.

Skills You'll Develop: This role is a deep technical investment in high-demand areas:

  • Distributed systems at scale — 500+ evaluations/second in production is serious scale engineering
  • Go programming — one of the most in-demand backend languages in cloud-native infrastructure
  • Observability & SLOs — a rapidly growing domain as every company moves toward site reliability practices
  • Open-source contribution — Grafana has massive OSS visibility, boosting your public engineering reputation

Culture Signals — Green Flags:

  • 30 days PTO + enforced shutdown days signals genuine respect for work-life balance
  • "High trust, low ego" and autonomous team culture — typical of strong engineering-led companies
  • Mentorship expectations built into the role suggest investment in team growth, not just output
  • In-person onboarding shows Grafana invests in culture even in a fully remote setting

Potential Considerations: On-call rotation is a real commitment — evaluate team size and rotation frequency during interviews. The role spans two products (Alerting + SLOs), which is a growth opportunity but also means managing broader context. Overall, this is a strong career move for a backend engineer looking to specialize in cloud-native infrastructure at a globally respected OSS company.

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives. Customers including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

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 applications from Spain.

The Opportunity:

The Grafana Alerting squad operates at the core of the Grafana open-source project (link), and our mission is to provide the most in-depth way to let users manage their alerts. The backend-focused team works closely with customers and the Grafana Cloud teams to make Alerting work on-prem and at infinite scale in Cloud. The team's scope spans both Grafana Alerting and the SLOs product, so engineers get to work across two products that are deeply connected in how they help users detect and respond to problems.

Grafana Alerting is trusted by major organizations worldwide, monitoring essential medical devices and critical infrastructure. We thrive on collective creativity and diverse perspectives — every team member is encouraged to contribute ideas that shape our product into a dependable tool.

Our domain is quite large. Here are some recent projects to give you an idea of the work we do:

  • Build distributed systems to scale alert ingestion and delivery of Prometheus-based alerts
  • Unify Alerting setup and delivery to work the same for Grafana and Prometheus-based alerts
  • Build distributed systems to scale alert evaluation of Grafana-managed alerts, reaching over 500 evaluations per second in production

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 ideation 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 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 Makes You a Great Fit:

  • 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 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 familiarity with Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar translates well
  • Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements and 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
  • Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

Compensation & Rewards:

In Spain, the compensation range for this role is EUR 94,025 – EUR 112,830. 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: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation 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.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this role fully remote or does it require going into an office?
This is a fully remote role. Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries. However, this specific posting targets applicants based in Spain.
What is the salary range for this Backend Engineer position in Spain?
The compensation range in Spain is EUR 94,025 to EUR 112,830 annually, plus Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Actual pay varies based on experience and skills assessed during interviews.
Do I need to know Go to apply for this role?
Go is the primary language used by the team, but Grafana Labs states that experience with Python, Java, C++, Rust, or similar languages translates well and they are open to candidates who do not yet know Go.
Does this role involve on-call responsibilities?
Yes, engineers are expected to participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of the services they operate as part of the team's responsibilities.
How much paid time off do Grafana Labs employees receive?
Grafana Labs offers a global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, which includes 3 reserved Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the whole team to disconnect simultaneously.
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