Jobs · Full-time

Remote Backend Engineer at Grafana Labs - EU — Columbus

LocationColumbus
CompanyGrafana Labs
Sourceweworkremotely
Posted2026-09-02 07:31:10

Traveler-Friendly Insight

Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries — one of the most genuinely nomad-friendly engineering employers in the industry. However, this specific role has a critical constraint: candidates must be located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, or Sweden. This limits which countries you can legally work from, so full location independence is not on offer here.

That said, within those five countries there is meaningful flexibility. The follow-the-sun OnCall rotation suggests async-first workflows are deeply embedded in the culture, meaning you won't be tied to rigid 9–5 hours. European timezone coverage (CET/GMT) is the de facto expectation, which suits base locations in Lisbon (not listed but adjacent in timezone), Berlin, Barcelona, or Stockholm.

If you hold residency in one of the five eligible countries, here's how the EUR 81,000–102,000 salary maps to living costs:

  • Barcelona, Spain: Very comfortable — monthly costs for a single person run ~€1,800–2,200 including rent in a good neighborhood. Strong digital nomad infrastructure.
  • Berlin, Germany: Solid but tighter — rent has risen significantly; expect €1,800–2,500/month. Still leaves substantial savings.
  • Stockholm, Sweden: Higher cost of living; €2,500–3,200/month. The salary is competitive but the gap narrows here.

No explicit coworking stipend or equipment budget is mentioned, but the company's remote-first ethos and in-person onboarding suggest travel budgets exist for team gatherings.

Headquarters: Republic of Ireland (Remote)

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.

Backend Engineer - Platform - Stacks

This role is available for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Sweden.

The Opportunity:

Application Core Services (AppCore) is a group within Platform, in the Foundations department. Foundations produces the Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) and partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams. Our team develops the essential systems driving Grafana's business operations. We utilize the grafana.com platform to engineer bespoke integrations and solutions that unify the diverse technical ecosystem of a modern software enterprise.

The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains. Our work includes:

  • Maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation
  • Automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract
  • Integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP
  • Building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts

This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales. We are looking for engineers who enjoy solving complex workflow and systems problems, improving reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders.

As a company we are remote-first and global. We embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities and collaborate across teams beyond their immediate scope.

What You'll Be Doing:

The AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configuration.

Our work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations. We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across grafana.com, Stack State Service (SSS), Hosted Grafana, cloud regions, and the underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure.

  • Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend, to track desired stack state, detect and repair drift across stack templates, grafana.com state, Hosted Grafana, and actual customer stack configuration
  • Collaborate across SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilient
  • Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity (e.g., aiming for single PR regional SSS deployment) and contributing to the Stack Config Reconciliation project
  • Manage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configuration
  • Support new region and cluster rollouts, including the operational paths required to bring stacks online safely in new Grafana Cloud regions
  • Improve incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment, reconciliation failures, plugin rollout issues, and Hosted Grafana integration failures
  • Partner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle work
  • Contribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operations
  • Help own the production behavior of the systems you build — improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures. You should be comfortable debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacks

What Makes You a Great Fit:

At Grafana, we actively embrace AI-assisted and agentic development practices, integrating these technologies into both our engineering workflows and the systems we deliver. We encourage our engineers to thoughtfully leverage AI tools to enhance every stage of the lifecycle, from design and implementation to testing, documentation, and operations.

We are seeking a Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount. As a remote-first organization, you should be comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones and taking full ownership of the critical systems powering Grafana Cloud. Our team is small and operates with a high degree of independence; you will be expected to lead major projects, coordinate across service boundaries, and help define the technical direction for our domain.

You will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops. We value engineers who can take ambiguous lifecycle requirements and transform them into explicit, modular solutions.

Some things you might be expected to do include:

  • Writing efficient, readable, and easy-to-maintain code
  • Implementing new microservices or systems
  • Collaborating with teammates and other departments to reach consensus on proposed solutions
  • Coordinating with product and UX when needed
  • Responding to customer requests and feedback
  • When ready, participating in our follow-the-sun OnCall rotation
  • Participating in team decisions, such as roadmap planning and prioritization

Requirements:

  • At least 1 year of fully remote work experience
  • Some experience working on a SaaS platform and familiarity with common distributed systems concepts (e.g., scalability, multi-tenancy, HA)
  • Professional experience with Golang and willingness to work across both backend service and application code
  • Deep care for developer and user experience and the quality of the products you work on
  • Some experience contributing to the delivery of projects, from initial brainstorming to shipping a product to the customer
  • Ability to write clean, well-tested software that other engineers can understand, operate, and maintain
  • Ability to take on well-defined tasks, break them down, and execute iteratively to deliver working solutions and gather feedback
  • Willingness to collaborate across teams and ensure your work is aligned with the needs of other squads and external stakeholders
  • Familiarity with Kubernetes in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and exposure to infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
  • Experience participating in blameless incident response and contributing to post-incident reviews

Bonus Points For:

  • Experience with TypeScript/Node.js
  • Experience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns, operators, reconcilers, or desired-state systems
  • Experience with Jsonnet/Tanka, Terraform, Flux, Argo, or similar deployment/configuration tooling
  • Experience working on SaaS provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, or customer lifecycle systems
  • Experience with incident response involving configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service state mismatch

Compensation & Rewards:

In Ireland the base compensation range for this role is EUR 81,000 – EUR 102,000. 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.

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.

To apply: https://weworkremotely.com/remote-jobs/grafana-labs-backend-engineer-platform-stacks-ireland-remote

Frequently Asked Questions

Which countries are eligible for this remote Backend Engineer role?
This role is open to candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and Sweden only. Grafana Labs is 100% remote but this specific position has geographic restrictions.
What is the salary range for this position?
In Ireland, the base compensation range is EUR 81,000–102,000 annually. Compensation ranges vary by country, and your recruiter will discuss the specific range for your market at the start of the process. All roles also include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
Does this role require on-call responsibilities?
Yes. When ready, engineers participate in a follow-the-sun OnCall rotation. The team also actively works on improving runbooks, alerts, and recovery procedures as part of normal engineering duties.
What programming language is primarily used in this role?
Golang (Go) is the primary language required, with willingness to work across backend service and application code. Experience with TypeScript/Node.js is listed as a bonus.
How async-friendly is this remote role at Grafana Labs?
Grafana Labs explicitly states that engineers should be comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones. The company is 100% remote with team members in 40+ countries and has a strong async-first engineering culture.
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