Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company that builds Grafana (visualization), Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs) and Tempo (traces). Tempo is an open source distributed tracing backend used to search traces, create metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs and metrics. The Tempo backend team builds and operates distributed systems for tracing ingestion and queries, develops TraceQL (a query language inspired by PromQL and LogQL), and maintains components such as the metrics-generator that produces metrics from ingested traces.

This is a remote opportunity for applicants in Canada time zones only, with a strong preference for AST and EST timezones.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and iterate on improvements.
• Lead projects from concept through implementation, and provide ongoing customer support.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain systems to ensure reliability, performance, and availability.
• Influence product and team roadmaps and manage your own career objectives.
• Participate in on-call rotations and perform operational / SRE tasks for services you own.
• Support and mentor team members and participate in design conversations and code reviews.
• Deepen knowledge of Grafana Cloud products, customers, and the Tempo codebase.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana Labs uses Go, but familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages is considered transferable.
• Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, brainstorming, shipping, and iterating based on feedback.
• Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud, or experience with systems engineering.
• Ability to write clean, robust, and performant software that is maintainable by others.
• Familiarity with being on-call and performing operations / SRE tasks, or familiarity with infrastructure as code.
• Strong communication skills, customer-focus, and a pragmatic approach to solving complex problems with short feedback loops.

Bonus

• Experience working with Kubernetes.
• Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call or hobby/homelab usage).
• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn.
• Experience working in fully remote, distributed teams across multiple time zones.

Compensation & Rewards

• In Canada, the base compensation range for this role is CAD 174,176 - CAD 209,011. Actual compensation may vary by level, experience, and skillset.
• Roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum (3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days), with compliance to local legislation where applicable.
• 100% remote, global culture with in-person onboarding events.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• Remote-first company with transparent communication, empowered teams, and an open-source culture.
• Opportunities for career growth, innovation, and working on high-impact observability tooling used by large organizations.

Equal Opportunity

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and may utilize AI tools in recruitment to assist matching CVs to postings. The recruitment team will manually review inbound CVs.