Principal Backend Engineer

This is a remote position, and we’re considering candidates in the United States time zones. We’ll be asking for availability to align with Eastern Time.What is Grafana Cloud?Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stackWithin engineering, the Observability team builds products that enable customers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure in any environment. We provide tools to instrument code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud, visualize it in an intuitive way and reduce MTTR for problems. The backend team is responsible for building multi-tenant, robust and highly scalable distributed systems that power the Observability solutions.We're looking for a principal-level engineer with a strong distributed systems background to both build and lead the Observability backend initiatives. 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. What will you be doing? Drive technical and business strategy in the Observability department. Influence the product roadmap. Drive innovations from ideation to customer adoption.Drive system design. Create design documents, collaborate within and across teams. Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.Build and operate critical systems. Own their reliability, performance, and availability.Participate in on-call rotations. Mentor and support other team members.Strive to become a subject matter expert for observability products and systems.Gain a deeper understanding of our cloud product, our customers and get to know the codebase of a large distributed system. 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.You have experience delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way.You have experience in building and deploying SaaS software on any one of the cloud providers like AWS, GCP or Azure.You have experience with Kubernetes.You have been responsible for operating production services and organizing/participating in on-call rotations.You actively mentor other team members, identifying areas for focus and improvement.You like to share your knowledge by creating blog posts, giving tech talks at meetups and conferences.You’re curious and enjoy learning new programming languages and frameworks, setting up examples, and figuring out how things work. Nice to haves: Been a power 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) In United States, the base compensation range for this role is USD 196,627- USD 235,953 Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed .*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.