Grafana Labs Has Two Hiring Regions. Its Job Posts Describe Them Eleven Different Ways.

Our third Company Spotlight goes to a company that publishes a salary band on every single open role, has not posted an office-attached job in living memory, and cannot agree with itself about which countries it hires in.

The last one turns out to be the most useful thing on the page, if you are the person deciding whether to apply.

Fact box

The story

Torkel Ödegaard released Grafana in January 2014. It grew out of work he was doing with Graphite at Orbitz, and the name is a portmanteau of the two tools it sat between: Graphite and Kibana. It was a dashboard he wanted and could not buy.

A year later he met Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods in New York, and the three of them started a company around it. They called it Raintank. The rename to Grafana Labs came in 2017, once it was obvious which of their assets people actually cared about.

The part of the history that still shapes the company is the licence. In April 2021 they moved Grafana, Loki and Tempo from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3. That is the licence that says if you run a modified version as a network service, you publish your modifications, and it is the move a company makes when it has decided that the hyperscalers reselling its work is a business problem rather than a compliment. Plugins and agents stayed permissive.

You can argue about whether that was the right call (people did, loudly, for about a month) but it tells you the shape of the thing. This is an open-source company that intends to remain one and has thought about the mechanics.

How they build

Kubernetes and Grafana itself appear in more of their open roles than anything else, at eight each, with Go in six and Prometheus in five. Terraform, OpenTelemetry, and a bit of TypeScript on the front end.

Two details worth pulling out.

They are on all three major clouds at roughly equal weight: AWS in six roles, Azure in five, GCP in five. For most companies that would read as indecision. For an observability vendor it reads as the job description, because you have to be wherever the customer's mess already is.

And Tanka and Jsonnet each show up in three roles. Those are Grafana Labs' own configuration tools, which means a meaningful slice of the engineering hiring is for people who will work inside the toolchain the company published rather than around it. They dogfood far enough down that it reaches the job posts.

Their pipeline runs on Greenhouse.

How they hire

Senior-heavy: fourteen of the eighteen open roles are senior, four are mid, and there are no junior roles open at all. That is more top-loaded than the market, which runs 60% senior against their 78%.

Nothing is office-attached. Zero onsite, zero hybrid, eighteen remote.

And every role publishes a salary band. All eighteen of them. Across the set, advertised pay runs from around $77k at the floor of the lowest band to around $425k at the ceiling of the highest, which reflects the range of roles rather than the range of any single one.

Eighteen out of eighteen is the part that is genuinely rare. The market average is 52.5%, and among companies with fifteen or more open roles, the ones at full disclosure fit on one screen. Grafana Labs is on that screen while being a company whose roles are spread across the UK, the US, Spain, the Netherlands, Israel and India, most of which have no law requiring any of this.

The observation

Here is the thing our data shows that their careers page will not.

Thirteen of the eighteen roles carry a written geographic restriction. Those thirteen restrictions are written eleven different ways.

Some of the strings say "US only". One says "East Coast US". One says "US Eastern time zones only". One says "US and Canada (EST time zone)". One says "Americas". One says "UK time zones".

And then there is this cluster, which is our favourite thing we have found in a job post this year. Four separate restriction strings name exactly the same five countries in four different word orders:

• "Spain, Sweden, UK, Ireland or Germany"

• "Germany, Ireland, Sweden, Spain and the UK only"

• "UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Sweden"

• "UK, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Ireland only"

Five roles, one policy, four sentences.

Read past the prose and the actual structure is simple and rather sane. Grafana Labs has two hiring regions: an American one that shades between "anywhere in the US" and "Eastern time zone", and a European one that is those same five countries, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Six roles in the first, seven in the second, five with no restriction written at all.

Two regions. Eleven sentences.

We do not think this is sloppiness so much as the visible fingerprint of how a distributed company actually works. Each hiring manager writes their own req. There is a real policy underneath, set by where the company holds legal entities, and nobody has centralised the sentence that describes it.

It matters practically, and this is the part worth taking away. If you filter a job board by "remote", these all come back. If you skim the restriction line, four of them look like four different European policies and you might conclude the roles you are eligible for are scattered. They are not. If you are in one of those five countries, the whole European set is open to you, and the word order is noise.

The other half of that: five roles carry no restriction string at all. That is not the same as global. It usually means nobody wrote one, and the constraint still exists somewhere in the recruiter's head. Ask early.

Questions people ask

What is Grafana Labs's tech ecosystem? Primarily Go on Kubernetes, running across AWS, Azure and GCP at roughly equal weight, with Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Terraform and their own Tanka and Jsonnet tooling, plus TypeScript on the front end.

Does Grafana Labs hire remote? Every one of its 18 currently tracked roles is remote, with no onsite or hybrid postings. Thirteen carry a geographic restriction, effectively resolving to two regions: the US or Americas, and a European set of Germany, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and the UK.

Does Grafana Labs hire juniors? Not right now. All 18 open roles are mid or senior, with 14 at senior level.

Does Grafana Labs publish salaries? Yes, on every open role, including roles based in countries with no pay-transparency law.

Close

Companies don't pay for spotlights; we choose them from what our users star.

The full stack and the current open roles are on the Grafana Labs listing, and starring it puts anything new on your file without you going back to check. If you would rather ask an agent than click, connect one here.

Three spotlights in, the pattern holds: the interesting fact about a company is almost never the one on its careers page, and it is usually hiding in a field nobody proofreads. If you work at Grafana Labs and want to tell us there is a twelfth phrasing we missed, or you work somewhere we should look at next, Discord is the place. We would rather be corrected than flattered.