engineering
Posted YesterdayStaff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | Canada | Remote
at Grafana Labs
CanadaRemote
Responsibilities
- Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions.
- Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives.
- Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems.
- Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response.
- Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence.
- Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR.
- Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives.
- Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs.
- Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning.
Requirements
- 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.
- Our Adaptive Telemetry solutions give users the ability to control and optimize their telemetry data.
- 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 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
- Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost.
- experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy.
- Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well.
- Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical
- Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
- *Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings.
- Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings.
Benefits
- Compensation & Rewards:
- In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 186,368 - CAD 223,642 . 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 .
- 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 &
- *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 &
- 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.
Contact
- Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X .
Additional details
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana.
- It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.
- The Databases department owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics , Loki for logs , Tempo for traces , and Pyroscope for profiles .
- We offer our databases as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud.