Senior Engineering Manager, Grafana Backend | Canada | Remote

Grafana Labs

9h•CA$211,450 - CA$253,740•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company with a global reach, serving over 20 million users with its visualization tool. The company also supports over 3,000 businesses with its observability solutions, Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Stack. As the company scales, it maintains its core values of an open-source legacy, a collaborative global culture, and a passion for meaningful work, fostering an innovation-driven environment built on transparency, autonomy, and trust. This is a remote position, open to candidates in the US or Canada, with a preference for EST working hours. The role involves managing a team of distributed engineers on the Grafana Backend team, focusing on creating a supportive environment by removing blockers, facilitating collaboration, and improving working practices. The Grafana Backend mission is to enhance the Grafana visualization product's backend, delivering a robust platform that supports high-demand services and enables users to leverage Grafana for infrastructure and software lifecycle observation. The team primarily works on OSS Grafana, with close collaboration with commercial offering customers, aiming to deliver an application platform that supports multi-tenancy and improves developer experience through research and collaboration with Product, Docs, and Customer Experience teams.

Requirements

Strong software engineering background.
Capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenging teams to arrive at strong technical decisions together.
Strong technical foundation is essential for success in the app platform area.
Ability to work with modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget.
Pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
Access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

Nice To Haves

Technical skills are desirable in order to understand some of our stack and manage a highly technical team (we primarily work with Go on back-end development).

Responsibilities

Manage a team of distributed engineers working across a variety of systems and helping them to perform at their best.
Remove blockers and impediments for the team.
Facilitate cross-team collaboration and understanding.
Aid the team in improving and refining their working practices.
Engage in technical conversations and challenge teams to arrive at strong technical decisions together.
Work with the team to set milestones, clearly communicate delivery timelines, and help remove impediments.
Work closely with stakeholders and product managers to ensure the product roadmap is defined and up-to-date.
Collaborate with others to ensure the product direction aligns with the company mission and define OKRs to demonstrate that.
Focus on quality above speed of delivery while encouraging a short feedback cycle and experimentation.
Work with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision making, be it technical or product focused.
Keep up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts to maintain and enhance understanding of team challenges.
Ensure direct reports are motivated, happy, and engaged through regular 1:1s.
Coach, mentor, and advise team members.
Provide continuous feedback to engineers to ensure they can add value while maintaining a high standard.
Gather a range of opinions from engineers and management to define upcoming features, contribute to design documents, and attend/contribute to open discussions.
Reach out to URMs to diversify voices within Grafana, working closely with the PeopleOps team.
Ensure features are well-defined and ready for development, and then set the wheels in motion to make sure they are delivered.
Empower individuals to start new initiatives, contribute to ongoing ones, and encourage and nurture others to do the same.
Work with the community, defaulting to transparency and openness.