Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company building observability tooling used by millions. The Tempo team develops Tempo, an open source distributed tracing backend used for searching traces, generating metrics from spans, and connecting traces with logs and metrics. This role is a remote opportunity for candidates located in Canada (preference for AST and EST time zones).

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with the team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and iterate on improvements.
• Lead projects from concept through implementation and ongoing customer support.
• Design, build, operate, and maintain reliable, high-performance systems with a focus on availability and scalability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and perform operations/SRE tasks for services you own.
• Influence the product and technical roadmap and contribute to team career development via mentoring and design discussions.
• Deepen knowledge of cloud products, customers, and the existing codebase.
• Communicate effectively in a remote-first environment and work asynchronously using documentation.

Requirements

• Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana Labs uses Go; familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar is also applicable.
• Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, designing, shipping, and iterating based on feedback.
• Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud, or experience in 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.
• Self-starter mindset, customer focus, pragmatic approach to solving complex problems, and strong collaboration and communication skills.

Bonus (nice-to-have)

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

Technologies & Concepts Mentioned

• Go (primary language used by the team)
• Tempo (Grafana Tempo tracing backend)
• TraceQL (Tempo's query language)
• metrics-generator (Tempo component)
• Distributed systems, observability (traces, logs, metrics)
• Kubernetes (bonus)
• Grafana, Prometheus (operational/observability tools)
• Cloud, SRE / on-call, infrastructure as code

Compensation & Rewards

• Base compensation range in Canada: CAD 174,176 - CAD 209,011. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skills assessed during the interview process.
• All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Why You'll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• Remote-first global culture, scaling organization, transparent communication, innovation-driven teams, open source roots, empowered teams, career growth pathways, in-person onboarding, and a generous annual leave policy (30 days, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days).

Equal Opportunity & Privacy

• Grafana Labs is an equal opportunity employer and will recruit, train, compensate, and promote regardless of protected characteristics.
• The recruitment process may use AI tools to assist matching CVs to job postings. The recruitment team reviews inbound CVs manually.