Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | Canada | Remote

Grafana Labs

12h • Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).
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.
This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from Canadian time zones only at this time.
Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services
The Opportunity:
The Managed Services team is a newly formed squad within the Databases department. It owns and operates shared, production-critical infrastructure that powers Grafana Cloud’s next-generation database products (Mimir, Loki, and Tempo). Today, this includes operating 100+ WarpStream clusters across multiple cloud providers and regions, with continued growth anticipated for the future. WarpStream acts as the streaming backbone for ingestion and read/write decoupling across databases. It sits directly on the hot path for metrics, logs, and traces, handling high-throughput, multi-consumer workloads at massive scale.
In addition to streaming infrastructure, the team works closely with high-volume analytical and storage systems that power query-heavy and aggregation-heavy workloads, where latency, compression behavior, storage layout, and scaling characteristics matter deeply.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
• Experience with high-throughput streaming systems, analytical or storage backends, or large-scale database infrastructure. Examples of these include Kafka, Redpanda, WarpStream, Postgres, ClickHouse, Snowflake, or Cassandra.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.).
• Experience leading or driving complex technical efforts, even without formal management responsibilities
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams around reliability improvements
• Strong understanding of distributed systems failure modes in multi-cloud environments.
• Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language (Go preferred, but not required).
• Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, cloud storage, and performance/scaling behavior.
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews.
• Clear communicator who can collaborate across teams and work autonomously.
• Intellectually curious, transparent, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)

Responsibilities

• Operating and evolving 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure
• Diagnosing and eliminating cross-layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.)
• Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale
• Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics
• Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance
• Working directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade-offs, etc.
• Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
• Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others.
• Help define and evolve the technical direction for operating WarpStream and adjacent shared database systems at scale
• Lead complex initiatives such as migrations, rollout improvements, and reliability investments
• Establish best practices around SLOs, scaling limits, failure isolation, and change safety
• Investigate and drive resolution of multi-layer incidents spanning storage, compute, networking, and control-plane dependencies
• Identify systemic risks across 100+ clusters and contribute architectural improvements that reduce recurring issues
• Improve systems toil and operational ergonomics with automation
• Partner with database and platform teams to align on strategy and long-term scalability
• Mentor and support engineers as the team matures
• Regular 1:1s with your manager and close collaboration with teammates across regions, helping shape how the team operates and matures
• Defining and evolving SLO strategy for shared database infrastructure, identifying systemic reliability gaps and driving long-term error budget improvements
• Setting standards for diagnosability across core streaming and database systems in production
• Leading complex initiatives across high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure
• Designing and promoting fault-tolerant architectural patterns that address distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbors, and control-plane dependencies
• Defining rollout, migration, and upgrade safety practices used across dozens of production clusters
• Partnering with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture decisions, roadmap prioritization, and long-term scalability strategy
• Leading design discussions and reviewing PRs with a focus on reducing operational risk and increasing system resilience
• Raising the bar for practices across teams by mentoring engineers and sharing distributed systems knowledge
• Playing a key role in high-impact incident response, guiding investigation, driving root cause analysis, and ensuring durable remediation through strong post-incident reviews

Benefits

• equity
• bonus (if applicable)
• other benefits listed here
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed