Staff Backend Engineer (Mimir Query, Databases)

Grafana; Canada; Remote; CAD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote work

Learning stipend

Headspace access

Parental leave

Pension plan

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Mimir Engineer to join our Databases team, driving the design, deployment, and operation of our cloud-scale telemetry databases across Mimir OSS and Grafana Cloud.

You will work on multi-tenant distributed systems, contribute to performance and reliability improvements, participate in on-call rotations, and help shape the product roadmap while collaborating with other engineers globally.

Qualifications

• Proven experience building distributed, cloud-based backend services.
• Strong Go background with Kubernetes and microservices.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana).

Responsibilities

• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems ensuring reliability.
• Own on-call rotations and incident response for services.
• Review PRs and design docs; drive automated releases.

Skills

Go

Kubernetes

Observability

Distributed systems

Cloud engineering

Microservices

On-call

DevOps

Team collaboration

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

Kafka

Job description

• The Databases team owns and operates the telemetry databases that are Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles
• Our databases are offered as a hosted service in Grafana Cloud, and additionally as on-premise solutions with Grafana Enterprise Metrics, Grafana Enterprise Logs, and Grafana Enterprise Traces
• They are multi-tenant distributed systems implemented in Go and operating at scale on Kubernetes across all major Cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• The Mimir squad has 3 sub-squads, Ingest, Storage, and Query, which together maintain the Mimir OSS project, and additionally own and operate Grafana Cloud Metrics across 3 major cloud providers
• Engineers on the team focus on optimizing the efficiency and resilience of processing, storing, and querying metrics at large volumes. These services operate at a large scale and performance is key to keeping the offering competitive and running smoothly
• A Mimir engineer has various work streams. They are likely engaged in a larger project with another engineer, and they are also incorporating some performance and reliability improvements discovered through operating the system in production
• They are also responsible for writing and reviewing PRs and design documents from other engineers in the squad, shepherding automated release rollouts, and participating in the on-call rotation for their systems
• Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
• Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve
• Drive projects from initial idea all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
• Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
• Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
• Be a part of your team’s follow-the-sun on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
• Support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
• Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system
• 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 have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption

• You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action. You are customer focused. We build everything with our users in mindYou have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs. You have good time management skills, which you leverage to work on the right things at the right timeExperience and comfort developing with LLMs like Claude and Codex on your day to dayExperience with leading and delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven and collaborative wayExperience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by othersExperience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or experience with systems engineeringSolid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, C, C++, Rust or similar then that translates wellExperience with being on-call and following the DevOps modelCollaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a squad. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication and time management skills are a mustPragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iterativelyFamiliarity with observability systems, know when to use metrics, logs, traces, to debug a problemComfortable with microservices architecture and distributed systemsExperience working with KubernetesBeen a user of Grafana and Prometheus in operational roles (including on-call for your team at a previous employer or just using these tools on hobby/homelab projects)Experience working with queue systems, e.g. the Kafka protocolFamiliarity with the concept of infrastructure as code