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Salary: CAD 164,500 - 197,000 / annual
Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to join the Databases team, which owns the telemetry databases powering Grafana Cloud: Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), and Pyroscope (profiles). These are open-source projects offered as both cloud services and on-premise solutions, built as multi-tenant distributed systems in Go and running on Kubernetes across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
In this role, you will design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems with ownership of reliability, performance, and availability. You'll take an active role in influencing the product roadmap and your career objectives, working with your team to deliver new features and iterate based on customer feedback. You'll drive projects from ideation through to production operations, embracing the open-source culture and contributing to projects beyond your immediate team scope. You'll participate in on-call rotations, mentor team members, engage in design discussions, and collaborate across the organization.
Grafana Labs is a 100% remote, globally distributed company with team members across 40+ countries. The engineering organization operates fully remote with regular video communication, so independence and strong communication skills are essential. The company is backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and others, with customers including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
The team invests heavily in developer productivity, providing access to modern AI coding assistants (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) with company-funded usage budgets to enable rapid iteration. The culture emphasizes pragmatic AI-assisted development for prototyping, testing, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-ups, paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You'll gain deep understanding of large distributed systems, cloud products, and customer needs while working in an innovation-driven environment that values transparency, autonomy, and trust.
**Requirements:**
- Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go preferred; Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar also valued)
- Experience delivering projects end-to-end: gathering requirements, brainstorming, shipping to customers in a self-driven manner
- Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud OR experience with systems engineering
- Demonstrated ability to write clean, robust, performant software that is easily maintained by others
**Bonus qualifications:**
- Experience writing low-level code for databases, storage layers, or query engines
- Kubernetes experience
- User experience with Grafana and/or Prometheus in operational roles (on-call, hobby projects, homelab)
- Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems
- Familiarity with on-call operations, SRE tasks, or infrastructure as code
