Senior Backend Engineer – Databases

Grafana Labs

. Own technical direction on the hardest Tempo roadmap problems .

Posted 10/14/2026full-timeRemote • Canada, United StatesSenior💰 CA$164,490 - CA$197,389 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building and operating distributed data systems, with a strong focus on performance, scalability, and observability. Capable of leading complex technical projects and mentoring engineering teams in a remote environment.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Distributed Data SystemsGo ProgrammingAPI DevelopmentSLO ManagementIncident Response

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Ingestion PipelinesStorage EnginesQuery ExecutionSoftware CraftsmanshipTracingSQL/TraceQLColumnar Storage FormatsKubernetesAI/LLM DevelopmentOpenTelemetry

Soft Skills

Clear CommunicationMentoring

Tools & Technologies

GrafanaPrometheusLokiTempo

Industry Keywords

Multi-Tenant SaaSOperational ToilPerformance OptimizationZero Ops PracticesOpen-Source Contribution

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

GrafanaKubernetesPrometheusRustSQLC++Go

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Own technical direction on the hardest Tempo roadmap problems
Deliver significant multi-month technical projects from problem framing through rollout
Own components across ingestion, storage, query, and metrics generation
Write and present design documents and participate in design reviews
Make trade-offs involving performance, cost, and complexity, and document decisions
Build structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs for humans, agents, products, and integrators
Own operational outcomes against SLOs such as P99 write latency, incident recurrence, and TCO per ingested GB
Improve automation, parameterized rollouts, actionable alerts, and Zero Ops practices
Collaborate with Product and App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams
Mentor and support junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, design feedback, and pairing
Participate in on-call, incident response, and post-incident learning
Engage the open-source community, review external contributions, and contribute to Tempo
Improve Tempo performance, autoscaling, query ranges, trace aggregation, customer limits, and multi-cell operations

Requirements

What you’ll need

Track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects spanning design, delivery, and operations
Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production
Experience with ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar systems
Strong software craftsmanship; clean, robust, and performant software development
Strong Go experience, or a path to Go; experience with Rust, C, or C++ translates well
Experience owning production services and carrying a pager
Experience reducing operational toil and treating SLOs as a product feature
Clear communication in a fully remote, asynchronous environment
Experience with tracing, OpenTelemetry, or large-scale observability systems is a bonus
Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or programmatically consumed APIs is a bonus
Experience with columnar storage formats such as Parquet or purpose-built analytical on-disk formats is a bonus
Experience operating multi-tenant, multi-cell SaaS infrastructure at scale on Kubernetes is a bonus
Experience building for AI/LLM consumers is a bonus
Open-source contribution or maintainership is a bonus
Experience with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, or Tempo on-call usage is a bonus
Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team is a bonus

Benefits

Comp & perks

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
Company-funded usage budget for modern AI coding assistants
Access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
100% remote, global culture
Career growth pathways
In-person onboarding
30 days annual leave per annum
3 annual leave days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days