Staff Software Engineer – Platform, SysEng | Canada | Remote

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is the company behind the open observability cloud, built on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Our fully managed observability platform, Grafana Cloud, is flexible and built for scale, incorporating useful AI to help organizations gain insights from their data. With over 35 million users and 7,000+ customers, including major industry players, Grafana Labs ensures the reliability of applications and systems, speeds up incident resolution, and optimizes telemetry for reduced noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with over 1,600 team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors.

The Opportunity

Grafana Cloud processes millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second, with ambitions to scale to hundreds of millions. The Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) team provides engineers with the tools, systems, and Kubernetes clusters essential for building, deploying, and running workloads. This role within the Platform SysEng squad is crucial for improving performance, reliability, and efficiency as the platform scales. The squad focuses on accelerating new region build timelines to meet customer demands and manages infrastructure for core Grafana Labs tools.

What You'll Be Doing

As part of the Platform SysEng squad, you will focus on the maturity and scalability of the platform, working across engineering to reduce new region build timelines. You will be involved in managing infrastructure for key Grafana Labs tools and contributing to a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• You enjoy collaborating with engineers and management structures.
• You are comfortable working in a remote-first company with a strong emphasis on communication, collaboration, kindness, and respect.
• You are keen on working with distributed systems.
• You are eager to learn and grow within a knowledge-rich environment.
• You approach development holistically, owning the full lifecycle of code and appreciating the big picture as well as the details.
• You have experience operating your code and understand the needs of both operators and developers.
• You are proficient with modern AI coding assistants and integrate them into your workflow.

Requirements

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems, with experience shipping and operating complex, multi-team systems and demonstrating technical leadership.
• Demonstrable experience in system design, with a deep understanding of tradeoffs in latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience, including cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and operational practices.
• Reliability and performance ownership, including defining SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, performance tuning, and driving reliability initiatives.
• Excellent coding and design skills, writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code. Experience with Go is preferred, but Python, C, C++, or Rust are also relevant.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development, demonstrating curiosity and practical experience using AI-powered developer tools.
• Ability to influence without authority, align stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, effective across technical and non-technical audiences.

Bonus Points For

• Experience in or with open-source projects.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter.
• Terraform and/or Crossplane experience.
• Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet.

Compensation & Rewards

• Base Compensation Range (Canada): CAD 186,368 - CAD 223,642
• Actual compensation will vary based on level, experience, and skillset.
• Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and other benefits detailed here.

Why You'll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture: Work with a diverse, worldwide team in a collaborative environment.
• Scaling Organization: Contribute to meaningful work in a high-growth setting.
• Transparent Communication: Benefit from open decision-making and regular updates.
• Innovation-Driven: Enjoy autonomy and support to pursue new ideas.
• Open Source Roots: Be part of a community-driven, values-based organization.
• Empowered Teams: Experience a high-trust, low-ego culture focused on outcomes.
• Career Growth Pathways: Access defined opportunities for professional development.
• Approachable Leadership: Engage with transparent and involved executives.
• Passionate People: Join a supportive team of smart, dedicated individuals.
• In-Person Onboarding: Participate in an immersive onboarding experience.
• Balance is Key: Enjoy a global annual leave policy of 30 days, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Grafana Labs is committed to diversity and equality in all aspects of employment. We recruit, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We believe diversity builds a strong organization.

Note: Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process for initial screening, with manual review by the recruitment team.