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

Grafana Labs

3d•CA$186,368 - CA$223,642•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for the Adaptive Telemetry, Databases team. This is a remote position for candidates in Canadian time zones. The Databases department manages telemetry databases (Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles) as a Cloud service. The Adaptive Telemetry group focuses on ensuring stored telemetry is worthy of attention by developing solutions to control and optimize data storage based on usage patterns, retaining only the most valuable data. Grafana Labs is a remote-first, global company that values diversity and inclusion, fostering a collaborative and innovative environment.

Requirements

Motivated self-starter with a bias towards action and customer focus.
Proven delivery of large distributed systems, with experience shipping and operating complex systems across multiple teams, demonstrating technical leadership and impact.
Strong systems-design instincts with a deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
Hands-on cloud and platform experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and their operational practices.
Reliability and performance ownership, including defining SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, performance tuning, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
Excellent coding and design skills, writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code.
Comfort with AI-assisted development, being curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools, ideally with practical experience integrating them into a team's workflow.
Experience with messaging and telemetry, including familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
Ability to influence without authority, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, setting priorities, and driving outcomes in a remote-first environment.
Strong communicator with clear written and verbal communication skills effective across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Candidates must be in Canadian time zones.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Go, Python, C, C++, or Rust.

Responsibilities

Drive technical strategy and roadmap, defining architectural vision and prioritizing work for product/platform improvements.
Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects, including planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation.
Own architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems, making pragmatic choices that balance various factors.
Define SLOs/SLIs, lead incident response, conduct blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation.
Improve observability, automation, and operational readiness by championing telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and automation efforts.
Align stakeholders and remove blockers by coordinating across Product, Design, and other teams.
Mentor and grow engineering talent by coaching engineers, leading design reviews, raising engineering standards, and helping teammates make sound technical tradeoffs.
Represent engineering internally and externally, communicating technical strategy and participating in cross-team planning.
Utilize modern AI coding assistants as part of the daily workflow with company-funded usage budget.
Engage in pragmatic AI-assisted development for faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, maintaining strong code review and quality standards.