Remote
Canada
$164K–$197K
💻Engineering
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Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote
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.
We build Tempo, the open-source distributed tracing backend behind Grafana Cloud Traces and Grafana Enterprise Traces (GET). Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.
2026 is an inflection point for Tempo. After a major architectural upgrade and the launch of TraceQL metrics, we are shifting from foundational work to product and operational excellence, and evolving Tempo from a SaaS database into a platform that powers Grafana’s next generation of observability products (App Observability, Asserts, Traces Drilldown, and AI-driven assistants).
Over the next year, you will help us:
As a Senior Engineer on Tempo, you will own technical direction on the hardest problems in our roadmap and raise the bar across the team.
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
These are the kinds of projects landing in 2026:
We are a remote-first team that meets regularly over video and does most of our work asynchronously, in writing. We value creativity, diverse perspectives, and clear communication. Tempo is relied upon by prominent global organizations to monitor critical applications and infrastructure, and we expect everyone on the team, including our senior engineers, to contribute ideas that make it a more reliable, more useful, and more loved product.
In Canada, the OTE (On-Target Earnings)/Base compensation range for this role is CAD $164,490 - $197,389. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.
*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.
Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.
Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
USD 164,490 - 197,389
Annually
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Disability Insurance
Life Insurance
Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
Health Savings Account (HSA)
Mental Health Benefits
Employee Assistance Program
Wellness Programs
401(k) / Retirement Plan
401(k) Match
Employee Stock Purchase Plan
Equity / RSUs
PTO / Vacation
Company Shutdown Days
Sick Days
Paid Holidays
Company Equipment
Coworking Allowance
Company Offsites / Retreats
Parental Leave
Learning & Development Budget
Conference Attendance
Mentorship Program
Defined Career Pathways
Employee Resource Groups
Employee Product Discount
Grafana Labs is fully remote with employees in more than 40 countries. It runs payroll-backed benefits in specific countries, including health coverage or stipends in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, Spain, Australia, and India, and employer retirement contributions in most of those plus Germany, so open roles are typically tied to those hiring locations.
Most processes start with a recruiter conversation, followed by hiring manager and leadership interviews, a role-relevant practical challenge such as a coding task or take-home with no trick questions, and final interviews on collaboration and decision-making. Senior and sales roles add a Wayfinder interview with a cross-functional team member to check values alignment.
Everyone gets 30 days of paid vacation per year on top of national holidays, sick leave, and parental leave. The company also observes several company-wide Shutdown Days each year so the whole team disconnects at the same time.
New hires choose their own laptop and accessories, which are refreshed every three years, and the company reimburses up to $175 a month for a personal coworking space. New Grafanistas are also flown in together for in-person onboarding to meet colleagues face to face.
The culture rewards people who default to transparency, have direct conversations even when they are hard, and ship early and often. The careers page is explicit about what it rejects, naming bureaucracy, busywork, finger pointing, and staying on the sidelines as its mortal enemies.
Performance Bonus
Flexible Schedule
