Staff Software Engineer – Identity and Access, Identity Squads | Spain | Remote
About the role
Staff Software Engineer – Identity and Access, Identity Squads
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 authentication protocols and flows.