Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, 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 @ 4 Communication @ 6 Compliance Debugging Distributed Systems @ 6 Grafana @ 3 IaC @ 4 Kafka @ 3 Kubernetes @ 4 Leadership @ 4 Microservices @ 4 Observability @ 3 Prometheus @ 3 Python @ 6 Rust @ 6 Technical Leadership @ 4

Drive technical strategy and roadmap. Proactively define the architectural vision, prioritize work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influence product and engineering decisions.
Lead end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects. Own planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation of large initiatives.
Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems. Make pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable.
Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response. Establish measurable reliability targets, run high-severity incident response, lead blameless post-mortems, and drive systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence.
Improve observability, automation and operational readiness. Champion telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging and lower MTTR.
Align stakeholders and remove blockers. Coordinate across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives.
Mentor and grow engineering talent. Coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews, raise engineering standards, and help teammates make sound technical tradeoffs.
Represent engineering internally and externally. Communicate technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and represent the team in cross-team planning.

Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
Strong systems-design instincts. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost.
Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy.
Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
Excellent coding and design skills. Write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and lead technical designs — Go is used, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well.
Comfort with AI-assisted development. Curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.
Experience with messaging and telemetry. Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Equity
Bonus (if applicable)
Other benefits listed here: https://grafana.com/about/careers/#jobs
100% Remote, Global Culture
Transparent Communication
Innovation-Driven
Open Source Roots
Empowered Teams
Career Growth Pathways
Approachable Leadership
In-Person onboarding (for day 1 onboarding)
Balance is Key: global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days (compliance with local legislation where applicable)