Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | Canada | Remote

Details

Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context, including data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge. The database layer provides both OLAP and OTLP capabilities, supports analytics queries and freshly stored data, embraces separation of compute and storage, and is designed to run across multiple cloud providers.

This is an early-stage, high-autonomy role focused on building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS. The position is remote and open to applicants located in the United States or Canada.

Responsibilities

• Own and build one or more parts of the database, including ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, and storage formats.
• Help define and build a scalable, multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Build APIs and database interfaces for AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Partner across product and infrastructure to balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Operate database services by implementing metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards.
• Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Contribute to architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.
• Communicate effectively and contribute across teams in a dynamic, collaborative environment.
• Take full ownership of database solutions to ensure they are innovative, scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

Requirements

• Strong experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• Ability to tackle complex engineering problems and make design decisions with minimal supervision.
• Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, with a practical focus on delivering high-quality solutions.
• Comfort releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating quickly.
• Proven initiative, ownership, and ability to define scope in ambiguous environments.
• Effective communication and a collaborative, solutions-oriented mindset.
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, and query engines.
• Mastery of a programming language such as Golang, C++, or Rust.
• Proven track record of delivering software that reached production and is actively used by customers.
• Exposure to cloud-native environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Bonus Points

• Experience building distributed query engines.
• Experience building data warehouses or data lakes.
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

Work Environment

Grafana Labs is a remote-first company. Teams meet regularly over video and conduct most work asynchronously and in writing. The role offers autonomy, collaboration, and ownership in a high-growth, open-source-oriented environment.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base compensation in Canada: $164,490–$197,389 CAD per year.
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are included with all roles.
• 100% remote global culture.
• Career growth pathways.
• In-person onboarding.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.