Staff Backend Engineer - Second Horizon | Canada | Remote

ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join our Second Horizon team at Grafana Labs. This is a remote opportunity, and we are looking for candidates from the U.S. or Canada, excluding residents of Quebec. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in building the first production services for our context layer management system. You will design and ship the core backend architecture that powers ingestion, context storage, retrieval APIs, and agent-facing integrations. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, testing, and operating the first services for context ingestion, context indexing, retrieval orchestration, API access, source configuration, and system administration. You will also help define and build the architecture for a multi-tenant service, including tenant isolation, usage tracking, quotas, audit logs, background jobs, and reliable service boundaries. Additionally, you will build APIs and service interfaces that allow AI agents, MCP tools, CLIs, and internal applications to retrieve relevant context, provenance, confidence signals, and warnings. You will work closely with the team to make practical tradeoffs between fast experimentation and long-term reliability, especially as the project moves from prototype to production. You will also operate what you build, instrumenting services with metrics, logs, traces, alerts, and dashboards, and using observability tools to understand system behavior and improve reliability. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need strong engineering skills, with solid experience building production-grade, user-facing software systems. You should be a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems and making UI design decisions with minimal supervision. You should also have experience with AI technologies and frameworks, and a practical mindset that focuses on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory. WHY REMOTE As a remote company, we value flexibility and autonomy. Our team operates with a high degree of ownership and decision-making, and we are looking for someone who can thrive in this environment. You will be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, and you should be able to communicate effectively and contribute across teams. BENEFITS As a member of our team, you will receive a competitive salary and a comprehensive benefits package, including health insurance, parental leave, and education stipend. You will also have the opportunity to work on a high-impact project that has the potential to drive significant change in the industry.