Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | Canada | Remote
Level inferred from job title
Job description
Staff Backend Engineer in the Adaptive Telemetry group of the Databases department, responsible for building and operating Adaptive Metrics, Logs, Traces and Profiles on Grafana Cloud. The role drives technical strategy, architecture, reliability and delivery of large cross-functional initiatives for telemetry databases.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time
- Work mode
- Remote · Canada
- Pay
- CAD 192,891 – 231,469 / year
What you'll do
- 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, owning planning, design, execution, rollout and long-term operation
- Own architecture, reliability, performance and cost for critical systems, making pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency and cost
- Define SLOs/SLIs and lead incident response, including high-severity incident response, blameless post-mortems, and systemic fixes and automation
- Improve observability, automation and operational readiness through telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation to reduce toil and lower MTTR
- Align stakeholders and remove blockers across Product, Design and other teams, negotiating tradeoffs for large initiatives
- Mentor and grow engineering talent, coach senior and mid-level engineers, lead design reviews and raise engineering standards
- Represent engineering internally and externally, communicating technical strategy to non-engineering stakeholders and in cross-team planning
What we're looking for
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems spanning multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
- Strong systems-design instincts and deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
- Hands-on cloud and platform experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and their operational practices
- Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
- Excellent coding and design skills: clear, maintainable, well-tested code and ability to lead technical designs (Go used; Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well)
- Comfort with AI-assisted development and AI-powered developer tools, ideally practical experience folding them into a team's workflow
- 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 with clear written and verbal communication across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- Motivated self starter with a bias towards action and customer focus, passionate about creating intuitive products that fit customers' needs
Your team
Adaptive Telemetry group, Databases department
The Adaptive Telemetry group ensures that all telemetry stored in the databases is worthy of attention and is responsible for the development of Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces and Adaptive Profiles. The Databases department owns and operates Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles.
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus (if applicable)
- 100% remote, global culture
- Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days
- In-person onboarding
- Company-funded AI tool usage budget and access to latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
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About Grafana Labs
The company behind Grafana Cloud
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. Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries.
Key facts
- Observability software
- 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries
- Grafana Cloud trusted by more than 10,000 organizations
- Backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital
- Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum
- Open-source legacy
Partners & customers
What they value
- Transparency
- Autonomy
- Trust
- Collaboration
- High trust, low ego
- Outcomes over optics