Staff Backend Engineer - Canada (Remote)

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 every ...

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 in US and Canada.

The Opportunity:

We are the creators of Pyroscope, an open-source continuous profiling database that offers rapid, scalable, highly reliable, and efficient storage and querying capabilities. It aids in gaining a comprehensive insight into resource utilization within applications, right down to the specific line of code. The project seamlessly integrates with Grafana, enabling users to correlate profiling data with metrics, logs, and traces, and leverage profiles as a crucial component of application observability. Our dedicated backend development team works closely with clients and the Grafana Cloud teams to deliver profiling solutions for on-premises and cloud environments at scale.

In our expansive domain, some of the projects we have undertaken include:

• Implementing distributed systems to effectively manage profile ingestion and queries.
• Establishing instrumentation support for various programming languages including Golang, Dotnet, Java, Ruby, eBPF, Python, , and Rust.
• Built & Enhanced the functionality of the Pyroscope plugins to provide users with an intuitive interface for exploring and analyzing application profiles.

This position focuses on implementing distributed systems to effectively manage profile ingestion and queries.

Pyroscope is trusted by leading multinational companies for essential applications and infrastructure. We prioritize innovation and inclusivity, empowering every team member to share ideas that improve our product as a dependable solution.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Collaborate with your team to deliver new features, analyze outcomes, and make improvements
• Lead projects from concept to implementation, including ongoing customer support
• Design, build, operate, and maintain essential systems, ensuring reliability, performance, and availability
• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Participate in on-call rotations and take responsibility for the services you oversee
• Support and mentor team members, engage in design conversations, and work closely with colleagues
• Expand your skill set by deepening your knowledge of our cloud products, understanding our customers, and learning about our codebase
• As we have embraced a remote-first approach and our engineering team is primarily remote, it is essential to possess strong communication skills and the ability to work independently. We provide support and hold regular meetings through video calls to ensure effective collaboration and alignment.

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 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• You are a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action
• We build everything with our users in mind.
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs.
• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively
• Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You'll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must
• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar, then that translates well
• Some experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer's hands in a self-driven way
• Strong experience with designing and developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others.
• Experience with being on-call and performing operations/SRE tasks or with the concept of infrastructure as code
• Solid experience with distributed systems
• Experience working with Kubernetes

Bonus Points For:

• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)
• Exposure to microservices architecture
• Databases backend experience

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.

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