Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | Canada | Remote

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.

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 located in the US or Canada.

The Opportunity:

At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. We recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise. As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context. This system helps agents retrieve the right data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge without every agent builder having to maintain their own brittle context files. The principle is simple: the context system retrieves, agents decide, and data teams maintain the intelligence.

The new team is a mix of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires. We operate with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, both as individuals and as a team. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early – while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.

We’re looking for a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for our general purpose data platform. The database layer has both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to support classic analytics queries while also serving up freshly stored data. It embraces the separation of compute and storage and is designed to run on multiple cloud providers. This is an early-stage role on a high-autonomy team, so you should be comfortable working through ambiguity, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS. As the team matures, there’s a broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: Design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats.
• Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries.
• Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly.
• Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production.
• Operate what you build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability.
• Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area.
• Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams.
• Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. You’re a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making design decisions with minimal supervision.
• AI experience with a practical mindset: You’re familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory.
• Quick iteration and experimentation: You’re comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.
• Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined.
• Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with your peers. You’re open to feedback, and you bring a solutions-oriented mindset to the table.
• Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines.
• Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience building distributed query engines.
• Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes.
• Experience building tools for data engineering.

How we work:

We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is $164,490 - $197,389. 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: 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.

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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