Staff Backend Engineer - Second Horizon | Canada | Remote

Details

Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system that provides agents with reliable, governed access to enterprise context, including data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge. The team is developing the first production services for this context layer management system.

This role will design and ship the backend architecture for ingestion, context storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. It is an early-stage, high-autonomy position requiring pragmatic architectural decision-making and the ability to evolve systems from internal experimentation to production-grade SaaS.

This is a remote opportunity for candidates located in the United States or Canada. Residents of Quebec are not eligible.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and operate backend services for context ingestion, indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration.
• Define and build a scalable, multi-tenant SaaS foundation, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Build APIs and service interfaces for AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings.
• Partner across product and infrastructure teams to balance rapid experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Instrument services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards, and use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Contribute to technical direction, including architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices.
• Communicate effectively and contribute in a highly dynamic, collaborative environment.
• Take ownership of AI solutions, ensuring they are scalable, maintainable, innovative, and aligned with real user workflows.

Requirements

• Strong experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems.
• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and applications powered by generative AI.
• A proven track record of delivering software that reached production and is actively used by users.
• Experience working in cloud-native environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.
• Ability to work independently, tackle complex engineering problems, make pragmatic decisions, define scope amid ambiguity, and iterate quickly through prototypes and user feedback.
• Effective communication and a collaborative, solutions-oriented mindset.

Nice to Have

• Experience with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
• Experience as a data analyst or working with data platforms such as Looker, Tableau, Power BI, Snowflake, or Databricks.
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

Benefits

• CAD $186,368–$223,642 base compensation range in Canada, with actual compensation varying by level, experience, and skill set.
• Equity, bonus when applicable, and other benefits.
• 100% remote global culture.
• In-person onboarding.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including three Grafana Shutdown Days where applicable under local legislation.
• Career growth pathways and an innovation-driven, empowered team environment.