Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Enterprise (Remote, Canada)

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs develops Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations. The platform integrates with open source tools like Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo to provide unified visibility and AI-powered insights for telemetry data. The company operates fully remote with staff across 40+ countries and is supported by leading investors.

The Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will design and build scalable backend systems powering Grafana Enterprise, a composable observability platform for large operators requiring high security and regulatory compliance. You'll join a global team devoted to solving challenges related to large-scale distributed systems, collaborating across teams and with enterprise customers.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and lead backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise features focused on large-scale operators
• Take ownership of project development from ideation to production
• Ensure scalability, reliability, security, and multi-tenancy of Grafana platforms
• Participate in on-call rotations to maintain operational health
• Hire and mentor engineers to strengthen the team
• Engage with customers to translate their requirements into engineering solutions
• Collaborate remotely using video calls ensuring strong teamwork and communication
• Utilize AI-assisted development tools to enhance productivity

Required Qualifications

• Proven experience designing and operating production backend services at scale
• In-depth knowledge of distributed systems concepts such as replication, consistency, partitioning, and fault tolerance
• Experience with building systems for multi-tenant, high-availability environments, preferably in observability or software delivery domains
• Proficient with gRPC/protobuf APIs and designing clean service contracts
• Strong database expertise including schema design, query optimization, and migrations in PostgreSQL and/or MySQL
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tooling for large-scale engineering organizations
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and containerized deployment, especially stateful and multi-tenant clusters
• Experience using observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing
• Understanding of dependency injection patterns and designing testable service architectures

Preferred Skills

• Experience with TypeScript and React for frontend collaboration
• Knowledge of Grafana's LGTM+ observability stack (Loki, Mimir, Tempo, Pyroscope, Alloy)
• Background working with large cloud service or IaaS providers under stringent SLAs
• Expertise in build infrastructure, artifact registries, distributed caches, and developer tooling

Compensation & Benefits

• In Canada, salary range is CAD 186,368 to 223,642, varying by experience and skillset
• Restricted Stock Units provide ownership stake in the company’s success
• Global annual leave policy with 30 days off per year including 3 company-wide shutdown days
• Fully remote position with global teams and culture emphasizing autonomy, collaboration, and transparency
• Onboarding includes in-person sessions to integrate with colleagues and culture

Equal Opportunity & Inclusion

Grafana Labs is committed to creating a diverse workplace and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds and identities. The company uses AI tools to assist recruitment but ensures manual review of all applications.