Staff Backend Engineer - Session Replay | Canada | Remote

Grafana Labs

5h•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse with over 20 million users globally, providing observability solutions with the Grafana LGTM Stack (Grafana Mimir, Loki, and Tempo) to more than 3,000 companies. The company is rapidly scaling while maintaining its open-source legacy, global collaborative culture, and passion for meaningful work, fostering an innovation-driven environment built on transparency, autonomy, and trust. The Session Replay squad is developing a new Grafana Cloud product designed to help customers understand user experiences when issues occur, connecting frontend signals to concrete session-level evidence for faster and more confident investigation of production problems. This team operates at the intersection of frontend observability, backend data processing and storage at scale, debugging workflows across products, privacy and access control, and performance and cost constraints. As Session Replay is in its early stages, this role will be instrumental in shaping both the product and its integration into Grafana Cloud, including evolving the backend architecture towards a columnar/analytical solution for high-volume session data. Grafana Labs embraces people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams. They are seeking Staff Software Engineers who are passionate about working with data and providing seamless customer experiences. The primary technology stack includes Golang, Typescript, and React, though tools are built for users employing many other stacks.

Requirements

Go (backend services and APIs)
Columnar/Analytical data storage (core data storage and querying)
Object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage) and MySQL
TypeScript / React (user-facing workflows)
Grafana ecosystem (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, etc.)
Comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key.
Collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful, operating by consensus.
Ability to contribute to a discussion, disagree constructively, and commit to the team’s decision.
Able to communicate design decisions clearly in written and spoken English.
Ability to reason about data-intensive systems (ingestion, storage, querying, cost trade-offs)
Comfortable owning features in ambiguous problem spaces.
Ability to work on your own is crucial.
Good understanding of a software development process that takes a user-centered approach.
Easily build an understanding of the users’ context and goals.
Enjoy working on complex solutions.
Value code maintainability, readability & automation.

Nice To Haves

Experience with columnar/analytical databases
Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc.).
Experience building debugging or developer-focused tools.
Familiarity with privacy, security, and access control in data-heavy systems
Experience working on performance-sensitive systems (large datasets, real-time queries, session data)

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end technical direction for Session Replay, spanning frontend, backend, and data systems
Drive the evolution of our backend architecture, including: Designing systems around columnar/analytical data storage for large-scale session data Defining data models, ingestion pipelines, and query patterns
Lead the design of investigation workflows, connecting replay with logs, metrics, traces and other telemetry across Grafana Cloud
Make high-leverage architectural decisions that impact multiple teams and products
Partner with teams across Grafana (Frontend Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, Core Grafana) to build cohesive cross-product experiences
Improve engineering standards, patterns, and operational practices within the team
Mentor engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team