Staff Software Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | Canada | Remote

Overview

Staff Backend Engineer on the Adaptive Telemetry group within Grafana Labs' Databases department, responsible for Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces and Adaptive Profiles. This is a remote position for candidates in Canadian time zones.

What you'll do

• Drive technical strategy and roadmap, 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, running high-severity incident response, leading blameless post-mortems, and driving systemic fixes and automation.
• Improve observability, automation and operational readiness, championing telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning and automation that reduce toil and lower MTTR.
• Align stakeholders and remove blockers, coordinating across Product, Design and other teams to align priorities and negotiate tradeoffs.
• Mentor and grow engineering talent, coaching senior and mid-level engineers, leading design reviews and raising engineering standards.
• Represent engineering internally and externally, communicating technical strategy to non-engineering stakeholders and representing the team in cross-team planning.

What you'll need

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems, with experience shipping and operating complex systems spanning multiple teams and clear evidence of technical leadership and impact.
• Strong systems-design instincts, with a deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost.
• Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy.
• Reliability and performance ownership, comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
• Excellent coding and design skills, writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code and leading technical designs; Go is used, with Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translating well.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development, curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools.
• Influence without authority, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, setting priorities and driving outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong communicator, with clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience with messaging and telemetry: familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tooling (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalents).
• Ideally practical experience folding AI-powered developer tools into a team's workflow.

Details

• Location: Canada (Remote), 100% remote company; 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.
• Annual leave: 30 days per annum, of which 3 days are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.
• In-person onboarding provided.