Senior Backend Engineer - Databases - Analytics | Canada | Remote
Senior backend engineer at Grafana Labs building the database/storage layer (OLAP + OTLP ingestion, query planning, distributed execution, storage formats) for a new AI-native enterprise data intelligence platform, including multi-tenant SaaS foundations. Core stack: Go/C++/Rust, distributed systems, cloud-native environments.
- Compensation
- CA$164.5K–CA$197.4K / yr
- Location
- Winnipeg, Canada
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Strong experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems
- Familiarity with AI technologies and frameworks with a practical mindset
- Comfort releasing prototypes and iterating quickly
- Proven initiative and ability to work through ambiguity with loosely defined scope
- Effective communication and collaborative attitude
- Experience with distributed systems, catalogs and table formats, query engines
- Mastery of a programming language like golang, C++, or Rust
- Track record of delivering software into production actively used by users
- Exposure to cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Experience using observability tools to troubleshoot system behavior
Nice to have
- Experience building distributed query engines
- Experience building data warehouses and/or data lakes
- Experience building tools for data engineering
Full description
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 (and their agents) 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. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
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.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
This is a remote opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants located in the US or Canada.
The Opportunity
At Grafana Labs, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. We recently started a skunkworks initiative with a mission to bring observability to the rest of the business. Our goal is to make Grafana the single best place where humans and AI agents understand and act on real-time data from across the enterprise. As part of this initiative, we are building an AI-native data intelligence system that gives agents reliable, governed access to enterprise context. This system helps agents retrieve the right data, metadata, definitions, lineage, quality signals, and institutional knowledge without every agent builder having to maintain their own brittle context files. The principle is simple: the context system retrieves, agents decide, and data teams maintain the intelligence.
The new team is a mix of seasoned Grafanistas and new hires. We operate with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, both as individuals and as a team. Engineers are empowered to make decisions, move quickly, and validate ideas early – while being supported by a deeply collaborative culture that values curiosity, feedback, and cross-functional partnership.
We’re looking for a Senior Software (Database) Engineer to help build the underlying storage system for our general purpose data platform. The database layer has both OLAP and OTLP capabilities to support classic analytics queries while also serving up freshly stored data. It embraces the separation of compute and storage and is designed to run on multiple cloud providers. This is an early-stage role on a high-autonomy team, so you should be comfortable working through ambiguity, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and building systems that can evolve from internal dogfooding to production-grade SaaS. As the team matures, there’s a broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative.