Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng | Canada | Remote
About The Position
Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for their Platform SysEng squad. This role is focused on the maturity and scalability of the platform, specifically working to reduce new region build timelines to meet customer demands. The Platform Engineering group manages infrastructure for teams building tools like Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. The role involves working with engineers and management structures in a remote-first environment, emphasizing collaboration, kindness, and respect. The ideal candidate will be keen on working with distributed systems, eager to learn and grow, and approach development holistically, owning the full lifecycle of code from design to integration testing. The team primarily works with Go, Python, and Shell, and experience operating code is highly valued. Grafana Labs invests in developer productivity, encouraging the use of modern AI coding assistants with a company-funded budget and access to frontier models. This is a remote opportunity, with a preference for applicants located in Canadian time zones (EST + CST highly preferred).
Requirements
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems.
- Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
- Demonstrable experience in system design.
- Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost.
- Hands-on cloud and platform experience.
- Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy.
- Reliability and performance ownership.
- Excellent coding and design skills.
- Comfort with AI-assisted development.
- Influence without authority.
- Strong communicator.
Nice To Haves
- Worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter.
- Terraform and/or Crossplane experience.
- Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet.
Responsibilities
- Provide application engineers with the tools, systems, and Kubernetes clusters they need to build, deploy, and run their workloads.
- Focus on the maturity and scalability of the platform.
- Reduce new region build timelines to meet customer demands.
- Manage infrastructure for teams building core Grafana Labs products.
- Ensure the health of the system through on-call rotations.
- Write design docs.
- Look at developer feedback.
- Perform integration testing.
- Define SLOs/SLIs, do capacity planning, tune performance, and drive reliability work end-to-end.
- Write clear, maintainable, well-tested code.
- Lead technical designs.
- Use AI-powered developer tools and integrate them into a team's workflow.
- Align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
- Communicate clearly in writing and verbally across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus (if applicable)
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
- 30 days of global annual leave per annum
- 3 days of Grafana Shutdown Days
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
