Staff Backend Engineer - Adaptive Telemetry, Databases | Canada | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Backend Engineer to join our Adaptive Telemetry team at Grafana Labs. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for driving technical strategy and roadmap, leading end-to-end delivery of large projects, and owning architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Backend Engineer on our Adaptive Telemetry team, your primary responsibilities will include: - Driving technical strategy and roadmap by defining the architectural vision, prioritizing work that unlocks major product or platform improvements, and influencing product and engineering decisions. - Leading end-to-end delivery of large, cross-functional projects by owning planning, design, execution, rollout, and long-term operation of large initiatives. - Owning architecture, reliability, performance, and cost for critical systems by making pragmatic architecture choices that balance scalability, availability, latency, and cost while ensuring systems remain maintainable and evolvable. - Defining SLOs/SLIs and leading incident response by establishing measurable reliability targets, running high-severity incident response, leading blameless post-mortems, and driving systemic fixes and automation to prevent recurrence. - Improving observability, automation, and operational readiness by championing telemetry, alerting, runbooks, capacity planning, and automation efforts that reduce toil, speed debugging, and lower MTTR. - Aligning stakeholders and removing blockers by coordinating across Product, Design, and other teams to align priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and unblock delivery for large initiatives. - Mentoring and growing engineering talent by coaching senior and mid-level engineers, leading design reviews, raising engineering standards, and helping teammates make sound technical tradeoffs. - Representing engineering internally and externally by communicating technical strategy clearly to non-engineering stakeholders and representing the team in cross-team planning. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need: - Strong technical expertise in backend engineering, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance. - Experience leading large, cross-functional projects and driving technical strategy and roadmap. - Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align stakeholders and remove blockers. - Strong mentoring and coaching skills, with the ability to grow and develop engineering talent. - Experience with modern AI coding assistants and a willingness to invest in developer productivity. WHY REMOTE Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with a global team of 1,600+ members across 40+ countries. We are looking for candidates in the Canadian time zones who are passionate about working in a remote-first environment. BENEFITS - Competitive salary and bonus structure. - Comprehensive health plan. - Parental leave policy. - Education stipend. - Life insurance. - Equipment stipend. - Flexible schedule. - Opportunity to work with a cutting-edge technology stack and contribute to the development of our adaptive telemetry solutions. - Access to modern AI coding assistants and a company-funded usage budget. - Opportunity to mentor and grow engineering talent. - Representation of engineering internally and externally.