Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases

Details

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Adaptive Telemetry group within the Databases department. This is a remote position for candidates in Canadian time zones.

Grafana Cloud is a composable observability platform integrating metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. The Databases department owns and operates Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles as cloud services supporting Grafana Cloud.

The Adaptive Telemetry group develops Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces, and Adaptive Profiles. These solutions help customers control and optimize telemetry data by optimizing storage based on individual usage patterns and retaining only the most valuable data.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap by defining architectural vision, prioritizing major product and platform improvements, and influencing product and engineering decisions.
• Lead the planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation of large, cross-functional projects.
• Own architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems, balancing scalability, availability, latency, cost, maintainability, and evolvability.
• Define SLOs and SLIs, lead high-severity incident response, run blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation.
• Improve observability, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, automation, and operational readiness to reduce toil and mean time to recovery.
• Align stakeholders across Product, Design, and engineering teams, negotiate tradeoffs, and remove delivery blockers.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and support sound technical decision-making.
• Represent engineering strategy internally and externally and communicate technical concepts to non-engineering stakeholders.
• Use AI-assisted development tools for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups while maintaining strong code review and quality standards.

Requirements

• Proven experience delivering and operating large distributed systems spanning multiple teams, with demonstrated technical leadership and impact.
• Strong systems-design skills and a deep understanding of latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost tradeoffs.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures, including microservices, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and operational practices.
• Experience defining SLOs and SLIs, performing capacity planning, tuning performance, and owning reliability work end to end.
• Excellent coding and design skills, with the ability to write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and lead technical designs.
• Experience with Go is preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages are transferable.
• Curiosity and practical experience using AI-powered developer tools and incorporating AI-assisted or agentic development into team workflows.
• Familiarity with streaming or messaging systems such as Kafka and observability tools such as Prometheus and Grafana or equivalents.
• Ability to influence without authority, align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• A customer-focused, self-starting approach with a bias toward action.

Benefits

• Base compensation range of CAD 186,368 to CAD 223,642.
• Equity, bonus where applicable, and other benefits.
• 100% remote, global culture.
• Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants.
• In-person onboarding.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per year, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days.
• Career growth pathways, transparent communication, empowered teams, and an open-source culture.
• Equal opportunity employment.

Grafana Labs may use AI tools to assist in matching CV information to job postings, while the recruitment team continues to manually review applications.