Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | USA | Remote

Overview

Staff Backend Engineer on the Mimir Query squad within the Databases team, owning and operating Mimir, the distributed metrics database behind Grafana Cloud Metrics. This is a remote position for candidates in USA time zones.

What you'll do

• Influence the 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 idea all the way to operations once in the hands of customers
• Embrace the 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 reliability, performance, and availability
• Be part of the team's follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you're running
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of the cloud product, customers, and the codebase of a large distributed system

What you'll need

• Motivated self-starter with a bias towards action
• Customer focused
• Passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs
• Good time management skills
• Ability to take on complex challenges and break them down into short feedback loops: analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback, then iterate
• Good communication and time management skills, a must for a fully remote setup
• Solid experience with at least one programming language; Go is used, and familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar translates well
• Experience leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements and brainstorming through shipping a product to the customer, in a self-driven and collaborative way
• Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud, or experience with systems engineering
• Experience being on-call and following the DevOps model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems; knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug a problem
• Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex in day-to-day work

Nice to have

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol
• Experience as a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call at a previous employer, or on hobby/homelab projects)
• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

Details

• Location: United States (Remote); candidates in USA time zones
• Fully remote setup
• Follow-the-sun on-call rotation
• Base compensation range in the United States: USD 189,374 - USD 227,249, varying by level, experience, and skillset