Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.

You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

Staff Software Engineer – Identity and Access, Identity Squads

This role is available for candidates located in the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Sweden.

The Opportunity:

Every day, millions of users rely on Grafana to monitor the health and performance of their critical systems, from software applications to factories and even space shuttles. Our mission is two-fold: to provide a seamless and effortless sign-in experience for all users, and to ensure administrators have complete peace of mind, knowing that every user has secure access to precisely the data and functionality they need.

The Identity and Access team at Grafana manages all aspects of authentication and authorization, working across both our open-source and proprietary codebases. The Identity squad, within the team, owns the authentication layer — the protocols and flows that determine how every Grafana user proves who they are. We actively implement cutting-edge authentication protocols such as MCP OAuth (OAuth 2.1), OIDC, SAML, LDAP, and SCIM, rather than relying on off-the-shelf components.

We are completely redesigning Grafana’s authentication at the edge — a rare opportunity to shape the technical direction of authentication infrastructure at scale, with a direct impact on millions of users every day.

Our code paths sit in the critical hot paths across Grafana’s services, making every millisecond of performance essential. As a Staff Engineer, you will be central to defining how we evolve these systems.

What You’ll Be Doing:

As a Staff Engineer on the Identity squad, you will set the technical direction for our authentication systems and lead the most complex initiatives from conception through delivery. You will collaborate closely with engineering leadership, product management, and cross-functional partners to define how Grafana authenticates millions of users every day.

• Approximately 55% of your time will be dedicated to backend development (Golang), 25% to technical leadership and cross-team collaboration, and 20% to operations and reliability.
• Define and own the technical architecture for the Identity squad’s authentication systems, including our edge authentication redesign.
• Lead the design and implementation of large-scale, multi-quarter initiatives in the critical path of user interaction, spanning multiple services and teams.
• Mentor and develop senior engineers, providing technical guidance, design feedback, and support for their professional growth.
• Serve as a technical authority for identity protocols at Grafana, driving alignment on how we implement and evolve OAuth, OIDC, SAML, LDAP, and SCIM across the organization.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment on authentication standards, patterns, and best practices across Grafana’s engineering organization.
• Represent Grafana Labs at meetups and conferences, and contribute to the broader identity and authentication community.

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 strong communication skills are essential.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Deep, proven expertise in distributed systems engineering with Go, with a track record of owning and delivering large-scale production systems end-to-end.
• Demonstrated ability to define technical direction and drive architectural decisions independently, with impact that extends beyond your immediate team.
• Extensive experience building and operating low-latency, high-throughput services in distributed, multi-tenant environments.
• Proven track record of leading and delivering complex, multi-quarter initiatives that span multiple teams or systems.
• Ability to mentor and develop senior engineers, elevating the technical quality and capabilities of those around you.
• Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and how to design systems that balance reliability, security, and product velocity.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English; able to clearly convey complex technical decisions to diverse audiences, including engineering leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
• Expert-level understanding of modern identity standards and threat models (OAuth 2.x / 2.1, OIDC, SAML), and how to implement them securely at scale.

Bonus Points For:

• Familiarity with Kubernetes.
• TypeScript/React experience.
• Experience working with OpenFGA and KiFederate IDP.
• Experience working in security critical environments.
• Experience contributing to or maintaining Open Source projects.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).

Compensation & Rewards:

In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is £100,000 - £124,000. 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.