Senior Backend Engineer - Grafana Ops - Alerting (Remote, EMEA)

Senior Backend Engineer - Grafana Ops - Alerting (Remote, EMEA)

What we do

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.

Our domain is quite large, so to get an idea of the kind of work we do, here are some projects we recently worked on:

• 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.

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.

What will you 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 are we looking for in you? 

• 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

Requirements:

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

Nice to haves:

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• 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 being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code