Grafana Labs - Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | Canada | Remote
Requirements
• Experience building distributed query engines. • Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes. • Experience building tools for data engineering. • How we work: • We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our Staff engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.
Responsibilities
• Take ownership over and build one or multiple parts of the database: Design, implement, test, and operate ingestion, query planning, distributed query execution, data formats, storage formats. • Create a scalable SaaS foundation: Help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant database service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries. • Power agent-facing retrieval workflows: Build APIs and database interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve data quickly. • Work across product and infrastructure: Partner with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production. • Operate what you build: Instrument database services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards. Use observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability. • Contribute to technical direction: Help shape the architecture, service boundaries, storage choices, API contracts, deployment patterns, and engineering practices for a new product area. • Effective communication: You’ll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams. • Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the database solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows. • What Makes You a Great Fit: • Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. You’re a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making design decisions with minimal supervision. • AI experience with a practical mindset: You’re familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory. • Quick iteration and experimentation: You’re comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset. • Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined. • Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with your peers. You’re open to feedback, and you bring a solutions-oriented mindset to the table. • Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines. • Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust • Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users. • Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure). • Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.
Benefits
• 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. • 100% Remote, Global Culture - • Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. • Scaling Organization • Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. • Transparent Communication • Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. • Innovation-Driven • Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. • Open Source Roots • Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. • Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. • Career Growth Pathways • Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. • Approachable Leadership • Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. • Passionate People • In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. • In-Person onboarding • Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable. • Balance is Key
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