Staff Backend Engineer - Distributed Tracing (Remote)

grafanalabs; United States; Remote; USD 129,000 - 172,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote role in Canada

Equity participation

Company-wide shutdown days

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a staff-level backend leader to steer the technical direction of a distributed tracing backend, enabling trace search, span metrics, and observability data integration across logs, metrics, and profiles. The role is remote for candidates based in Canada and emphasizes scale, reliability, and AI-assisted troubleshooting.

You will own architecture across ingestion, storage, querying, and metrics, design deterministic APIs, mentor engineers, and drive automation to improve

Qualifications

• Staff-level experience setting technical direction for distributed systems or large-scale backend platforms.
• Strong architectural experience with data ingestion, storage, query systems, and metrics or analytics generation.
• Ability to lead ambiguous, cross-team initiatives and make clear trade-offs involving performance, cost, reliability, and complexity.
• Experience designing dependable APIs for products, integrations, or automated consumers.
• Proven focus on operational excellence, measurable service objectives, automation, and reducing engineering toil.
• Effective written and verbal communication, collaboration, and technical mentorship skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead complex, multi-quarter initiatives from problem definition through production rollout, including trace aggregation, autoscaling, customer limits, and query-engine improvements.
• Own architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, querying, and metrics generation, balancing performance, cost, reliability, and complexity.
• Design structured, deterministic, discoverable APIs that can support human users, downstream products, external integrations, and AI agents.
• Improve operational performance against measures such as write latency, incident recurrence, and total cost per ingested volume through automation and better rollout practices.
• Collaborate with product managers and adjacent engineering teams to understand platform needs and remove technical blockers.
• Mentor engineers and raise the quality of technical design and execution across the team.

Job description

Grafana Labs is seeking a staff-level backend leader to steer the technical direction of a distributed tracing backend, enabling trace search, span metrics, and observability data integration across logs, metrics, and profiles. The role is remote for candidates based in Canada and emphasizes scale, reliability, and AI-assisted troubleshooting.

You will own architecture across ingestion, storage, querying, and metrics, design deterministic APIs, mentor engineers, and drive automation to improve