SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: CAD 164,490 - 197,389 / annual
Grafana Labs is building an AI-native data intelligence system as part of a new skunkworks initiative to bring observability to the broader enterprise. The mission is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data across the enterprise. This system provides agents with reliable, governed access to enterprise context—data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge—without requiring individual agent builders to maintain brittle context files.
You will join a high-autonomy team of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires, operating with significant ownership and empowerment to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early. The team values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.
As a Senior Backend Engineer focused on Databases, you will take ownership of building the underlying storage system for this general-purpose data platform. The database layer supports both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to handle classic analytics queries while serving freshly stored data. It embraces separation of compute and storage and is designed to run across multiple cloud providers.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design, implement, test, and operate core database components: ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, and storage formats
- Build a scalable SaaS foundation with multi-tenant architecture, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries
- Create APIs and database interfaces enabling AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data efficiently
- Partner across product and infrastructure teams to balance fast experimentation with long-term reliability as the project moves from prototype to production
- Instrument database services with comprehensive observability: metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards
- Contribute to technical direction, shaping architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices
- Communicate effectively in a dynamic, collaborative environment and take full ownership of database solutions for scalability, maintainability, and alignment with user workflows
This is an early-stage role with broad opportunity to expand or redefine responsibilities based on impact and initiative as the team matures.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong production-grade software engineering skills with proven ability to tackle complex problems and make design decisions with minimal supervision
- Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks, with a practical mindset focused on real-world solutions
- Comfort with rapid iteration, prototyping, and pragmatic feedback loops
- Demonstrated initiative and ownership; ability to drive projects forward and define scope in ambiguous situations
- Excellent communication and collaborative skills; openness to feedback and solutions-oriented approach
- Experience with distributed systems, catalogs, table formats, and query engines
- Mastery of Go, C++, or Rust
- Proven track record of delivering production software actively used by users
- Exposure to cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior
BONUS:
- Experience building distributed query engines
- Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes
- Experience building tools for data engineering
