Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases

📍 Canada

CAD 186,400-223,600 per year

SENIOR

✅ Remote

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AI AWS Azure Codex @ 4 Communication @ 7 Debugging @ 3 DevOps @ 4 Distributed Systems @ 6 GCP Go @ 4 Grafana @ 4 IaC Kafka @ 4 Kubernetes @ 4 LLM Microservices @ 6 Observability @ 3 Prometheus @ 4 Python @ 4 Rust @ 4 Security

Details

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join the Mimir Query team. This remote role focuses on designing, building, operating, and maintaining distributed telemetry database systems used by Grafana Cloud Metrics.

Grafana Cloud integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles through open-source technologies including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. The Databases team operates multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and running at scale on Kubernetes across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Responsibilities

Influence the team roadmap and personal career objectives.
Deliver new features and iteratively improve them based on results, data, and customer feedback.
Drive projects from initial ideas and requirements through production operations.
Contribute to open-source projects beyond the immediate team scope.
Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, with ownership of reliability, performance, and availability.
Participate in follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of operated services.
Support team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate in a fully remote squad.
Write and review pull requests and design documents.
Shepherd automated release rollouts.
Develop a deeper understanding of Grafana Cloud, customers, and large distributed-system codebases.
Use AI coding assistants for prototyping, test generation, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups, subject to security guidelines and code-quality standards.

Requirements

Strong pragmatism and the ability to break complex challenges into modular solutions with short feedback loops.
Strong collaboration, communication, and time-management skills.
Solid experience with at least one programming language. Grafana Labs primarily uses Go; experience with Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages is also relevant.
Experience leading and delivering projects from requirements gathering and brainstorming through product delivery.
Experience developing cloud software or working in systems engineering.
Experience with on-call responsibilities and the DevOps model.
Experience writing clean, robust, performant, and maintainable software.
Familiarity with observability systems and using metrics, logs, and traces for debugging.
Comfort working with microservices architectures and distributed systems.
Experience using large language models such as Claude and Codex in day-to-day development.

Bonus Qualifications

Experience with Kubernetes.
Experience with queue systems, such as the Kafka protocol.
Experience using Grafana and Prometheus in operational, on-call, hobby, or homelab environments.
Familiarity with infrastructure as code.

Benefits

Base compensation in Canada of CAD 186,368–CAD 223,642 per year.
Equity, bonus where applicable, and other company benefits.
100% remote work and a global culture.
Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants.
In-person onboarding.
30 days of annual leave per year, including three Grafana Shutdown Days, subject to local legislation.
Career growth pathways, transparent communication, empowered teams, and open-source-focused culture.