Senior Backend Engineer - Observability Ingest - Kubernetes Operator/Helm Chart | UK | Remote

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants based in Spain, Germany, the UK or Sweden at this time.

The Opportunity:

 
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 stack

The Grafana Cloud Observability department is focused on enabling developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure in any environment by providing tools to instrument their code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud and visualize and explore it.

In this role, you will be part of the Ingest team that develops the software that helps our users to get Grafana's observability stack up and running and keep it working over time. We build and maintain the configuration and deployment tooling that bridges the gap between "I want observability" and "I have observability,". To achieve this we are responsible for projects like the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart, Fleet Management and the Instrumentation Hub. 

If you care deeply about developer experience, love the challenge of making complex distributed systems approachable, and want your work to have a direct, visible impact on thousands of users, this role is for you.

What You’ll Be Doing:

You will bring your expertise to develop and maintain the tooling that powers the ability of our customers to deploy and operate the tooling to ingest observability data into the Grafana stack. This includes 

• Design, build and maintain user-facing tools that support the deployment, configuration and operation of Grafana Alloy, the OpenTelemetry Collector, and related components. As of today this enables 1.8 million running instances to send data to Grafana Cloud.
• Own and evolve our Helm chart ecosystem run on more than 10k clusters and 300k nodes, writing charts that are robust, well-tested, and a pleasure for users to use
• Build and maintain tooling that works across platforms: Kubernetes-first, but rock-solid on Linux, Windows, and macOS, too
• Support infrastructure-as-code integrations using ArgoCD, Terraform, Flux, and other GitOps utilities
• Collaborate closely with support, product, and field engineering to understand real customer pain points and translate them into durable tool improvements
• Work in the open: communicate progress transparently, review peers' code thoughtfully, and help raise the technical bar for the whole team
• Contribute upstream to open source projects including Grafana Alloy, OpenTelemetry, and Helm community charts
• Represent Grafana Labs in meetups, and conferences and social media forums

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).

What Makes You a Great Fit:

At Grafana Labs, we expect you to be comfortable working in a remote-first culture; communication is key. For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful. We operate by consensus, you are expected to contribute to a discussion, and commit to the team's decision.

• You believe that great tooling is a force multiplier and you take pride in boosting the experience of the person on the other end of the tooling you build and maintain
• You're a strong communicator, clear in code review, helpful in customer-facing issues, and comfortable working async across time zones
• You love writing tests and treat them as a core part of the design process, not an afterthought
• You're comfortable going deep on a platform problem, whether that's a Kubernetes scheduling edge case, a Windows path separator bug, or a Terraform provider quirk
• You engage with the open source community and care about the health of the projects you depend on
• 4 years of professional software engineering experience, with at least one major language (Go preferred; Python, Rust, and others welcome)
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience: deploying, operating, and debugging workloads in production environments, including familiarity with Helm and the Kubernetes resource model
• Experience building or maintaining tooling for external users or customers - you've thought carefully about API/UX design, backward compatibility, and upgrade paths
• Comfortable writing and maintaining automated tests at multiple levels - unit, integration, and end-to-end

Bonus Points For:

• Direct experience with Grafana Alloy or the OpenTelemetry Collector - configuration, pipeline design, or contributing upstream
• Experience authoring or maintaining Helm charts, especially in a community or production context
• Experience with GitOps tooling, including Terraform, ArgoCD, or Flux
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• Experience building or contributing to developer-facing CLIs or configuration tooling
• Familiarity with the broader Grafana ecosystem: Loki, Mimir, Tempo, or Pyroscope
• A history of open source contributions with evidence of community collaboration

In United Kingdom, the compensation range for this role is GBP 91,755 - GBP 110,106. 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.