Director of Engineering, Loki Databases | Canada | Remote
Job description
Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).
We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from Canada time zones only at this time.
Director of Engineering, Loki Databases
The Opportunity:
Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack.
The Databases department owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. We offer our databases as a Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud.
The Logs group, part of the Databases department, has the mission of ensuring that we provide the most-scalable, efficient and easy-to-use logs database . Under that mission, the Logs group is responsible for the development of Grafana Cloud Logs, Loki OSS, and Grafana Enterprise Logs.
Loki is a Cloud-native database, built in Go, delivered as microservices, and with data stored in object storage that powers logs observability at scale.
As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Leading a team of 20+ engineers and growing them over time, including managing managers, developing a team of engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations.
- Collaborate closely with product, design and engineering leadership to define goals that move the Logs group forward and align with broader business objectives. Drive the product vision from listening to customer feedback and anticipating market trends.
- Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from early ideation through planning, execution and post‑launch guiding the team to deliver high‑quality outcomes consistently.
- Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and a culture of continuous improvement.
- Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.
What Makes You a Great Fit
- A strong Director level engineering people manager with an entrepreneurial vision.
- A motivated self-starter with a strong bias toward action and ownership, able to navigate ambiguity and drive work forward in complex problem spaces.
- Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety.
- Experienced in guiding and supporting other engineers, leading initiatives or small teams, and collaborating effectively to drive projects to successful outcomes.
- Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
- Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and real-world impact.
- Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
- Comfort with AI-assisted tooling. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.
Compensation & Rewards:
In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 240,084 - CAD 288,101. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.
All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.
*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.
Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:
- 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
- Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
- Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
- Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
- Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.
Equal Opportunity Employer: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.
Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
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