Staff Backend Engineer - Session Replay | USA | Remote

What you'll be doing

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will operate as a technical leader and systems thinker, driving both product direction and architectural evolution, specifically, you will:

• Own end-to-end technical direction for Session Replay, spanning frontend, backend, and data systems
• Drive the evolution of our backend architecture, including:
  • Designing systems around columnar/analytical data storage for large-scale session data
  • Defining data models, ingestion pipelines, and query patterns
• Lead the design of investigation workflows, connecting replay with logs, metrics, traces and other telemetry across Grafana Cloud
• Make high-leverage architectural decisions that impact multiple teams and products
• Partner with teams across Grafana (Frontend Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, Core Grafana) to build cohesive cross-product experiences
• Improve engineering standards, patterns, and operational practices within the team
• Mentor engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team

Technologies you'll work with

• Go (backend services and APIs)
• Columnar/Analytical data storage (core data storage and querying)
• Object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage) and MySQL
• TypeScript / React (user-facing workflows)
• Grafana ecosystem (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, etc.)

What Makes You a Great Fit

• You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key.
• For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful. We operate by consensus. You can contribute to a discussion, disagree constructively, and commit to the team’s decision. You are able to communicate design decisions clearly in written and spoken English.
• Ability to reason about data-intensive systems (ingestion, storage, querying, cost trade-offs)
• You are comfortable owning features in ambiguous problem spaces. We are a small team, working remotely, on a product that will be used by engineers all over the world – the ability to work on your own is crucial.
• You have a good understanding of a software development process that takes a user-centered approach. You easily build an understanding of the users’ context and goals which will help you build the right solution with the maximum value.
• You enjoy working on complex solutions – Grafana is a highly technological solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and who care deeply about their workflows. You value code maintainability, readability & automation.

Bonus Points For

• Experience with columnar/analytical databases
• Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc.).
• Experience building debugging or developer-focused tools.
• Familiarity with privacy, security, and access control in data-heavy systems
• Experience working on performance-sensitive systems (large datasets, real-time queries, session data)

Compensation & Rewards

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 174,986 - USD 218,733. 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 here.