Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Pyroscope

About the Company

Grafana Labs is the organization behind an open observability cloud, built on open-source values, open standards, open ecosystems, and a collaborative culture. Its managed observability platform helps teams understand and act on complex data at scale, with AI-assisted capabilities designed to improve reliability, incident response, and telemetry efficiency. The company operates fully remotely with a globally distributed team and serves a large customer base across many industries.

This role is open to candidates based in the US and Canada.

Role Overview

The team works on Pyroscope, an open-source continuous profiling database used to store and query profiling data quickly, reliably, and at scale. The product helps engineers understand application resource usage down to line-level detail and connects with Grafana so profiling data can be analyzed alongside metrics, logs, and traces. The backend team partners closely with customers and Grafana Cloud teams to deliver solutions for both on-premises and cloud environments.

This position is centered on backend work for distributed systems that handle profile ingestion and query processing.

What You’ll Do

• Work with your team to ship new functionality, review results, and improve what is delivered.
• Own projects end to end, from early concept through implementation and customer support.
• Architect, develop, run, and support core systems with a focus on uptime, speed, and reliability.
• Help shape product direction as well as your own growth path.
• Join on-call rotations and take responsibility for the services you operate.
• Guide teammates, contribute to design discussions, and collaborate closely across the team.
• Strengthen your understanding of the cloud products, customer needs, and the codebase.
• Work effectively in a remote-first environment through clear communication and independent execution.
• Use AI coding assistants and frontier models within security and quality guidelines to speed up development, testing, refactoring, documentation, and incident follow-up.

What We’re Looking For

• A self-driven engineer who moves quickly and takes initiative.
• A product mindset with attention to end-user needs.
• The ability to simplify complex problems into small, iterative steps with fast feedback.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills for a fully remote team setup.
• Solid experience in at least one programming language; Go is used here, and Python, C, C++, Rust, or similar languages are also relevant.
• Experience taking products from requirement discovery through delivery in an independent way.
• Background in building cloud-based software or working in systems engineering.
• Ability to write clean, dependable, high-performance software that others can maintain.
• Experience with on-call work, operations/SRE tasks, or infrastructure-as-code concepts.
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems.
• Experience working with Kubernetes.

Nice to Have

• Prior use of Grafana and Prometheus in operational or on-call settings.
• Exposure to microservices-based architectures.
• Backend database experience.

Compensation and Benefits

The stated pay range for Canada is CAD 164,490 to CAD 197,389 annually. Final compensation may differ based on level, experience, and assessed skills. The role also includes Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving team members ownership in the company’s growth.

Additional benefits and culture highlights include a global remote-first environment, open communication, high trust and autonomy, career growth opportunities, and in-person onboarding with new team members. The annual leave policy provides 30 days per year, including 3 shutdown days reserved for disconnection, subject to local legal requirements where applicable.

Equal Opportunity and Hiring Notes

Applications are welcomed from people of all backgrounds and protected characteristics, in line with local law. The company also notes that it may use AI tools during recruitment to help match resumes to openings, while the hiring team continues to review applications manually. Personal data handling is subject to the company’s privacy policy.