Staff Backend Engineer – Remote in Winnipeg

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, giving teams unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions.

Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.

This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the USA time zones.

The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads, Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the Mimir OSS project, and additionally own and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across 3 major cloud providers. Engineers on the team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly.

A Mimir engineer has various work streams. They are likely engaged in a larger project with another engineer, and they are also incorporating some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production. They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems.

What will you be doing:

• Take an active role in influencing our 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 our 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 the reliability, performance, and availability.
• Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running.
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team.
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system.

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 with strong code review and quality standards.

What makes you a great fit:

• You are a motivated self-starter with a bias towards action.
• You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mind.
• You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs.
• You have good time management skills, which you leverage to work on the right things at the right time.
• Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops.
• Collaboration and communication: Good communication and time management skills are a must.
• Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar translates well.
• Experience with leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven and collaborative way.
• Experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineering.
• Experience with 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, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problem.
• Comfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systems.
• Experience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day to day.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience working with Kubernetes.
• Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocol.
• Been a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles.
• Familiarity with the concept of infrastructure as code.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 186,368 - CAD 223,642. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law.