Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | Canada | Remote

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Drive technical strategy and roadmap, defining the architectural vision
• ▹Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects
• ▹Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems
• ▹Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response, including blameless post-mortems
• ▹Improve observability, automation and operational readiness (runbooks, capacity planning)
• ▹Align stakeholders and remove blockers across Product, Design and other teams
• ▹Mentor and grow senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews

Requirements

• ▹Proven delivery of large distributed systems with clear technical leadership and impact
• ▹Strong systems-design instincts: deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
• ▹Hands-on cloud and platform experience: cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC)
• ▹Experience defining SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning and performance tuning
• ▹Excellent coding and design skills; the team uses Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust translates well
• ▹Experience with messaging/streaming systems (e.g. Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana)
• ▹Strong written and verbal communication, ability to influence without authority

Nice to have

• ▹Comfort using AI-assisted developer tools (e.g. Claude Code) as part of daily workflow

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Equity and bonus (if applicable)
• ▹Company-funded budget for AI coding tools (e.g. GPT-Codex, Claude Opus, Gemini Pro) for daily work
• ▹100% remote work in a global team spanning 40+ countries

About the company

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, building Grafana Cloud. It serves more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Salesforce – with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, fully remote.