Grafana Labs
Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana Cloud Observability | Canada, MST/CST/EST/AST | Remote
Job Summary
This role involves developing and maintaining Grafana Cloud's observability applications and infrastructure, with a focus on designing scalable integrations for various systems. Candidates should have extensive experience in software development, cloud environments, and observability tools, and be capable of leading technical projects and mentoring team members. The position emphasizes ownership, community contribution, and open-source engagement, with a strong focus on delivering high-quality, scalable solutions. The company offers a remote-first work environment with benefits such as equity and bonuses.
Required Skills
Benefits
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 the Canadian MST/CST/EST time zones only at this time.
The Opportunity:
At Grafana Labs, our engineers have a dedicated career path and do not have to become managers to progress in their career. Staff Software Engineers at Grafana have a large amount of experience across multiple areas. They are able to estimate, plan, coordinate and deliver large tasks spanning multiple systems. They actively coach and mentor other team members in their team and are able to identify and resolve issues with technology and product processes.
What You’ll Be Doing:
We define senior roles via the scope of their business impact more than via their expertise or their specific activities. So the most important thing we are looking for in an engineer is the ability to take ownership. You will need to drive technical implementations working with the upstream community and contribute to business conversations, helping shape the long-term strategy. You will bring your passion for observability and software engineering expertise to help us take our infrastructure monitoring capabilities within Grafana Cloud to the next level. This will include working with our Kubernetes monitoring and Cloud Provider observability solutions.
- Design and implement high-quality, scalable integrations for various infrastructure components, databases, and applications
- Create middleware components, SDKs, and libraries that simplify development and maintenance of observability solutions
- When necessary, represent Grafana Labs in open source forums, working groups, and events
- Work with product teams, in addition to design and docs, to develop features that align with wider product strategy and customer needs
- Support the technical direction and vision of the team, contributing to strategic discussions and future development of observability solutions
- Work with other departments including Sales, Product, and Support teams to deliver a holistic product experience
- Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
- Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is entirely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude,good communication skills, and transparency are a must.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- Strong 8+ years of experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but do not require candidates with Go experience. Long term experience in any major language (Python, .NET, Java, Rust, etc) with a willingness to learn Go is acceptable.
- Demonstrated experience working with and monitoring Kubernetes in a production environment
- Experience with cloud-based software development and production systems
- Experience writing clean, maintainable, robust, and performant software
- Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry)
- Experience with delivering projects from start to finish in a self-driven manner
- Experience in a hands-on technical leadership role, setting technical direction and leading project teams
- Experience with microservices architecture and distributed systems
- Excellent problem-solving and debugging skills
- Strong mentoring and leadership skills
- Experience participating in an on-call rotation and incident management
Bonus Points For:
- Experience designing and building observability backends for various systems and applications
- Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects, with evidence of successful pull requests and community collaboration
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)/ Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
- In-depth knowledge cloud platform internals
- Strong understanding of metrics collection, visualization, and alerting concepts
Compensation & Rewards:
In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 174,176 - CAD 209,011. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.
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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Grafana Labs
Grafana is the open source analytics & monitoring solution for every database.
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