Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | Canada | Remote

Overview

Staff Backend Engineer on the Mimir Query squad of the Databases team, working on the telemetry databases behind Grafana Cloud (Mimir, Loki, Tempo and Pyroscope) and on the open source Mimir project.

What you'll do

• Influence the roadmap and your own career objectives
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve
• Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Embrace the open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team's scope
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning reliability, performance, and availability
• Take part in the follow-the-sun on-call rotation and take ownership of the services you run
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions, and collaborate with the team
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of the cloud product, customers, and the codebase of a large distributed system

What you'll need

• Motivated self-starter with a bias towards action
• Customer focused
• Good time management skills
• Pragmatism: able to break complex challenges down into short feedback loops, delivering MVPs and iterating
• Good communication and time management skills in a fully remote setup
• Solid experience with at least one programming language (Go is used; familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar translates well)
• Experience leading and delivering projects from requirements gathering through to shipping a product to customers, in a self-driven and collaborative way
• Experience developing software that runs in the Cloud, or experience with systems engineering
• Experience being on-call and following the DevOps model
• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others
• Familiarity with observability systems; knowing when to use metrics, logs, and traces to debug a problem
• Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems
• Experience and comfort developing with LLMs such as Claude and Codex in day-to-day work

Nice to have

• Experience working with Kubernetes
• Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol
• Experience as a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call at a previous employer or on hobby/homelab projects)
• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code

Details

• Remote position; candidates in Canadian time zones
• Base compensation range in Canada: CAD 192,891 - CAD 231,469, varying by level, experience, and skillset
• Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits