Staff Backend Engineer in Winnipeg

Application Core Services (AppCore) partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams to deliver reliable internal and customer-facing systems that power critical parts of the Grafana business. We build on the grafana.com platform to create custom solutions and integrations across the many systems that support a modern software company. The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains.

Our work includes maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation, automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract, integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts. This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales.

The AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configuration. Our work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations.

We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across grafana.com, Stack State Service (SSS), Hosted Grafana, cloud regions, and the underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure. When this domain works well, customers get reliable stack creation, safe configuration rollout, predictable migrations, and fewer manual operational interventions.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend, to track desired stack state, detect and repair drift across stack templates, grafana.com state, Hosted Grafana, and actual customer stack configuration.
• Collaborate across SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilient.
• Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity and contributing to the Stack Config Reconciliation project.
• Manage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configuration.
• Support new region and cluster rollouts, including the operational paths required to bring stacks online safely in new Grafana Cloud regions.
• Improve incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment, reconciliation failures, plugin rollout issues, and Hosted Grafana integration failures.
• Partner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle work.
• Contribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operations.

You will help own the production behavior of the systems you build. That includes improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures. You should be comfortable debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacks. There is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously. As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day. You will work closely with counterparts in other regions to provide balanced coverage and shared ownership.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow, backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards.

Benefits:

• Vacation: 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave.
• Healthcare: Health coverage or stipends for colleagues in various countries.
• Retirement planning: Employer contributions into pension pots for team members in select countries.
• Professional development: $1,500 annual learning and development stipend.
• Work location: Fully remote roles with reimbursement for personal co-working space.
• Choice of tech: Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us.
• Mindfulness: Complimentary subscription to Headspace.
• Global Employee Assistance Program: 100% confidential support service with 24/7 access.
• Paid parental leave: Offered to all eligible new parents.

We are looking for engineers who enjoy solving complex workflow and systems problems, improving reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders. We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount.

You should be adept at breaking down complex systems work into safe, iterative increments while clearly communicating technical tradeoffs to both internal stakeholders and adjacent product teams. You will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops.

Qualifications:

• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews.
• Professional experience with Golang and willingness to work across both backend service and application code.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience working on a big SaaS platform and dealing with common distributed systems problems.
• At least 1 year of fully remote work experience.
• Experience with mentoring junior engineers in a collaborative but asynchronous environment.
• Experience with TypeScript/Node.js.
• Experience with Jsonnet/Tanka, Terraform, Flux, Argo, or similar deployment/configuration tooling.
• Experience with incident response involving configuration drift, partial failure, or cross-service state mismatch.