Staff Backend Engineer - Mimir Query, Databases | Canada | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE Grafana Labs is building the world’s most widely used open‑source observability platform, and our Cloud offering serves more than 35 million users and 7,000 customers worldwide. As a Staff Backend Engineer on the Mimir Query squad, you will help shape the future of metrics storage and retrieval at scale, ensuring that our customers can ingest, store, and query billions of time‑series data points with low latency and high reliability. You will work closely with cross‑functional teams to design, implement, and operate the core query engine that powers Grafana Cloud Metrics across AWS, GCP, and Azure, while also contributing to the open‑source Mimir project that powers the broader observability ecosystem. WHAT YOU'LL DO You will own the design and delivery of high‑performance query features, from initial concept through production rollout, and will drive the evolution of Mimir’s query architecture to meet growing customer demands. You will collaborate with the Ingest and Storage sub‑squads to ensure seamless end‑to‑end data flow, and you will mentor junior engineers through code reviews and design discussions. You will participate in on‑call rotations, taking responsibility for the availability and resilience of the query service, and you will analyze production incidents to uncover root causes and implement long‑term fixes. You will also engage with the wider open‑source community, contributing to Mimir and related projects, and you will influence the product roadmap by sharing technical insights and customer feedback. WHAT YOU'LL NEED You have at least eight years of production experience building distributed systems in Go, with a deep understanding of database internals, query optimization, and large‑scale data processing. You are comfortable working in a fast‑moving, high‑volume environment and can translate complex requirements into robust, maintainable code. You have a proven track record of delivering high‑quality, production‑grade features, and you are adept at troubleshooting performance bottlenecks and reliability issues in multi‑tenant services. Strong communication skills enable you to articulate technical concepts to both engineering peers and non‑technical stakeholders. You are familiar with Kubernetes, cloud‑native architecture, and the fundamentals of observability tooling such as Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo. WHY REMOTE Grafana Labs is a fully remote, distributed company with a culture built around asynchronous collaboration, trust, and autonomy. Your work will be coordinated through shared documentation, chat, and video, allowing you to focus on deep technical problems without the distractions of a traditional office. We value flexibility, so you can structure your day around your personal productivity rhythms while still staying connected with teammates across time zones. The remote model also gives you the freedom to choose a home‑office setup that best supports your creativity and well‑being. BENEFITS Health, dental, and vision coverage; generous paid time off; a remote work stipend; a