Senior AI Engineer - Ops, AI/ML

Company: Grafana Labs
Location: Schiller Park
Posted on: January 8, 2026

Job Description:

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). 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. This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from USA time zones only at this time. Senior AI Engineer The Opportunity: At Grafana, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. The Grafana AI teams play a key role in this mission by helping users make sense of complex observability data through AI-driven features. These capabilities reduce toil, lower the barrier of domain expertise, and surface meaningful signals from noisy environments. What makes our team different is how we work: we operate with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, both as individuals and as a team. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early – while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership. We’re looking for an AI Software Engineer with a strong software engineering background, a quick iteration mindset, and a passion for experimentation – balanced by a focus on shipping and scaling impactful features that deliver value to users. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to develop, test, and ship AI-powered features that contribute to improving infrastructure and observability quality through automation, while also expanding the capabilities of AI agents across the observability stack to assist users with incident response. As the team matures, there’s a broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative. What You’ll Be Doing: • Build and deliver AI solutions: Take ownership of developing high-performance AI features to help users detect, triage, and resolve incidents using observability data and tools. • Rapid experimentation and iteration: Implement a highly iterative process where you quickly prototype, test, and validate with real users, including shipping and evolving LLM- or agent-powered workflows for incident lifecycle management and automated analysis tasks. • Collaborate cross-functionally: Work with data analysts, product managers, and designers to shape AI-driven product features, including integration of agentic components with internal tools, alerting systems, runbooks, and developer workflows. • Utilize AI tools effectively: Use AI and automation tools to enhance both product functionality and your own development workflows. • Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams. • Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows. What Makes You a Great Fit: • Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production software systems (backend and / or full stack). You’re a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems with minimal supervision. • AI experience with a practical mindset: You’re familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory. • Quick iteration and experimentation: You’re comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset. • Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined. • Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with peers, product managers, and designers. You’re open to feedback, and you bring a solutions-oriented mindset to the table. Requirements : • Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI. • Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users. • Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure). • Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior. Bonus Points For: • Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi agent workflows. • Experience with infrastructure / devops related tooling: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform or similar for deployments. • Familiarity with model fine-tuning techniques. • Experience building observability tooling. Compensation & Rewards: In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 154,445 - USD 185,334. 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. 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. *Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process. Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs: • 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. • Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. • Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. • Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. • Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. • Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. • Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. • Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. • Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. • In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. • Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Keywords: Grafana Labs, Elgin , Senior AI Engineer - Ops, AI/ML, IT / Software / Systems , Schiller Park, Illinois