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.Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do. This is a remote position. Tempo makes it easy to search traces, generate metrics from spans, and connect tracing data with logs, metrics, and profiles across the Grafana stack.

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 Make Grafana Cloud Traces “just work” for customers by eliminating rough edges, confusing limits, and hidden failure modes.

Push performance further: faster query latency at hundreds of MB/s ingestion and performant 30-day query ranges to match competitors.

Prepare

Tempo for an agent-driven world: larger, burstier, higher-cardinality workloads, and new categories of AI-powered workflows, such as assistant-driven triage and “why is this slow?”- What You’ll Be Doing 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. Deliver significant technical projects. Take well-scoped, multi-month initiatives from problem framing through rollout, e.trace aggregation APIs, Limitless Tempo, autoscaling cells and customer limits, or query engine improvements.

Partner with Staff engineers and the tech lead on broader, cross-team direction. Write and present design docs, participate in design reviews, make sound trade-offs on performance, cost, and complexity, and document the “why” for the team. Help shape the next generation of Tempo’s interfaces (structured, deterministic, discoverable) so that Act 3 products, LLM-driven assistants, and external integrators can build on Tempo reliably.





Own outcomes for the areas you build against concrete SLOs (P99 write latency, incident recurrence, TCO per ingested GB), and help move the team toward Zero Ops through automation, parameterized rollouts, and actionable alerts. Work with PMs and with App Observability, Asserts, Drilldown, and Grafana Assistant teams to understand how Tempo gets consumed and to ship what unblocks them. Raise the bar through thorough code review, constructive design feedback, and pairing, especially with junior and mid-level engineers.

Participate in on-call for the services you help build, and contribute to incident response and post-incident learning. You will engage the community, review external contributions, and contribute to the project in the open. 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 solid code review and quality standards. Example problems you could work onThese Are The Kinds Of Projects Landing In 2026 Trace aggregation and higher-density APIs: extend TraceQL metrics, design LLM-friendly response types, and make Tempo a first-class data source for Grafana’s AI assistant. Autoscaling end-to-end: customer limits and Tempo cells, with hysteresis, predictive scaling for spikes, and safe scale-down.

Query performance: new data formats, smarter query pipelines, targeted optimizations for common Drilldown and Traces workflows, and 30-day query ranges. Limits and self-service: drive customer-facing configuration and observability so escalations trend toward zero. Technical ownership.

A track record of delivering complex, multi-month projects that spanned design, delivery, and operations, and of helping the teammates around you grow. Solid systems experience. Significant hands-on experience building and operating distributed data systems in production: ingestion pipelines, storage engines, query execution, or similar.

Robust software craftsmanship. You write clean, robust, performant software that others can maintain, and you know when to optimize vs. when to ship. Solid experience in other systems languages (Rust, C, C++) translates well.

Customer focus and pragmatism. Collaboration and clear writing. You contribute through design docs, reviews,



and shipped code, and you communicate clearly in a fully remote, asynchronous environment.

Bonus Points For

Experience designing query languages, SQL/TraceQL-like engines, or APIs intended to be consumed programmatically (by services or agents).

Experience building for AI/LLM consumers: structured APIs, metadata/discovery endpoints, deterministic outputs, evaluation harnesses. Open-source contribution or maintainership, and comfort engaging a community in the open.

Experience in a fully remote, globally distributed team.

How We Work

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. 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. ~ 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. ~ Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. ~ Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. ~ Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. ~ Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what we do. ~ Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.

We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

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

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📌 Senior Backend Engineer - Databases Tempo | Canada | Remote (Toronto)
🏢 Grafana
📍 Toronto