Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Enterprise | 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 position. We are looking for candidates in the US and Canada.
The Opportunity:
Grafana Enterprise is our composable observability platform focused on large-scale operators with security and regulatory requirements who need to self-operate their observability solutions. Grafana Enterprise features are also part of our Grafana Cloud service. Grafana Cloud is an integrated suite of observability applications offered as a service. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software, including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo, without the overhead of installing, maintaining, and scaling their own observability stack.
The Grafana Enterprise team is a diverse team of expert technologists working remotely from around the globe. The team focuses on innovative solutions to large-scale customer challenges and developing solutions that improve security, robustness, flexibility, multitenancy, and interoperability on behalf of our customers. We work across the larger Grafana Labs organisation and directly with external customers, including major cloud service providers and global enterprises running observability and build infrastructure at massive scale, to solve their most demanding distributed systems challenges. Our customers include software engineers, site reliability engineers, and platform operators at medium, large, and global enterprises.
As a company we are remote-only and global; we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software. Our meetings tend to happen between 14:00 and 17:00 UTC, but we are flexible and responsive to the needs of our engineers and our customers. We measure ourselves by our openness, helpfulness, and our shared successes.
We are looking for experienced software engineers who are passionate about distributed systems and building reliable, scalable backend infrastructure to join our growing team. Our backend is Go, and we build tools for people operating some of the world's largest observability and software delivery stacks. Backend Engineers at Grafana also contribute to open source communities.
What You’ll Be Doing:
- Earning the trust of our large-scale operator customers to further Grafana's "big tent" philosophy of data accessibility and to meet clear business objectives
- Designing and leading the development of backend services, distributed systems, and enterprise features at scale
- Driving continuous improvement of our engineering culture through words and actions
- Driving projects from initial ideation through the development lifecycle to production
- Contributing to the scalability, reliability, security, and multi-tenancy of the Grafana platform trusted by some of the world's largest operators
- Owning the operational health of our platform by participating in weekday 12h x 5d and separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations. (Yes, we prioritize ops load reduction.)
- Hiring and developing the best engineers to build the future of Grafana
- Developing your skills as a thought leader to drive continuous improvement of engineering and operational practices across Grafana Labs
- As we are remote-first, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so strong teamwork and excellent written and interpersonal communication skills are a must.
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction.
We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- You work well as a communicative member of a team of engineering professionals.
- You earn trust by saying what you mean and doing what you say.
- You are customer focused and especially attuned to the needs of large-scale operators who rely on Grafana as critical infrastructure. You start with their needs and work backwards.
- You insist on the highest standards and work to develop the skills and knowledge of your fellow team members.
- You take on complex distributed systems challenges, break them down into digestible problems, and leverage your team and organization to deliver.
- You design modular solutions, deliver minimum loveable products, gather data and feedback, and then progress iteratively.
What will you be doing? (Role specifics)
As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will design and build the backend systems powering Grafana Enterprise — the platform trusted by the world's largest operators to run their observability and software delivery infrastructure.
- Hiring and developing the best engineers we can to deliver the future of Observability.
- Architecting and implementing distributed backend services in Go, with a focus on correctness, observability, and performance at scale
- Designing APIs and service contracts used by thousands of enterprise operators and cloud service providers
- Collaborating with Product and UX to shape features and partnering with frontend engineers to ship complete, end-to-end solutions
- Driving scalability and reliability improvements that matter to large-scale operators running Grafana in regulated, high-availability environments
- Engaging directly with large enterprise customers and cloud service providers to understand their requirements and translate them into robust engineering solutions
- Advocating for our customers at every stage of the development lifecycle
What technical competencies are we looking for?
- Deep professional experience writing production services, from ideation through to production operations at scale
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals: replication, consistency models, partitioning, fault tolerance, and the trade-offs that come with operating at scale
- Demonstrated experience designing and operating systems for large-scale, high-traffic, high-availability, or multi-tenant environments, ideally in the context of infrastructure, observability, or software delivery platforms
- Professional experience building and consuming gRPC/protobuf APIs and designing clean service contracts across service boundaries
- Strong database skills, such as PostgreSQL and/or MySQL; including schema design, query optimisation, and schema migrations at scale
- Experience with large-scale CI/CD systems and build tooling, designing, operating, or integrating with continuous delivery pipelines that serve large engineering organisations or external operators at scale
- Comfort working with Kubernetes and containerised deployment environments, including patterns for operating stateful workloads and multi-tenant clusters
- Experience with observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing
- Familiarity with dependency injection patterns (e.g., Google Wire) and clean, testable service architecture
What are your "nice to have" technical competencies?
- Experience with TypeScript and React for contributing to frontend features and collaborating closely with frontend engineers
- Experience with Grafana's LGTM+ observability stack (Loki, Mimir, Tempo, Pyroscope, Alloy)
- Prior experience at or building for large-scale cloud service providers, IaaS providers, or global enterprises with demanding SLA requirements
- Experience designing or operating large-scale build infrastructure artifact registries, distributed build caches, hermetic build systems (e.g., Bazel), or developer platform tooling
In Canada, the compensation range for this role is $186,368 - $223,642 CAD. 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.
*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.
#LI-Remote