Staff Backend Engineer - Grafana App Platform | Canada | Remote
About the role
The Opportunity:
As our Cloud / Grafana-as-a-service business continues to grow, we've started to change Grafana's core architecture to be fully multi-tenant and scalable, as well as a solid platform for our opinionated Cloud apps.
We're looking for someone with a lot of experience with SaaS platforms at scale. We are turning Grafana into a proper observability app platform where OSS and proprietary apps can directly tap into dashboards, alerts, incidents, and telemetry and deliver even more integrated experiences.
To get there, we need to refactor a big part of Grafana so that it's simpler and standardized. Grafana is used by countless OSS and Cloud users across different platforms, so planning and rolling out changes safely to avoid service disruptions is crucial; we are looking for someone who is excited about this sort of work.
What You'll Be Doing:
- Coding new features, enhancing the operational experience of the systems you develop, and iteratively improving them based on production insights
- Authoring, contributing to and reviewing design documents
- Taking an active role in shaping the roadmap
- Mentoring and supporting other team members and collaborating with different teams across the organization
- Owning the experience of our customers by participating in weekday 12h x 5d and a separate weekend 24h x 2d on-call rotations.
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 paired with strong code review and quality standards.
You'll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- You have strong coding skills and operational experience; you were responsible for operating the software you have built.
- You have worked