Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases

About the Position

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases to join our team. This is a remote position, and we are specifically looking for candidates in the Canadian time zones.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs - we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have 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.

We Offer

• Compensation: In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 186,368 - CAD 223,642. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process.
• Benefits: Equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits listed here.
• Remote-first, 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.

About the Company

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.