Staff Backend Engineer - Application Core Services, Stacks | Canada | Remote

Job Application for Staff Backend Engineer - Application Core Services, Stacks | Canada | Remote at Grafana Labs Back to jobs New Staff Backend Engineer - Application Core Services, Stacks | Canada | Remote Canada (Remote) Apply Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack , both featuring scalable metrics ( Grafana Mimir ), logs ( Grafana Loki ), and traces ( Grafana Tempo ). We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do. You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity. This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants located in Canadian time zones (EST + CST only at this time). Staff Backend Engineer - Application Core Services, Stacks The Opportunity: Application Core Services (AppCore) partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams to deliver reliable internal and customer-facing systems that power critical parts of the Grafana business. We build on the grafana.com platform to create custom solutions and integrations across the many systems that support a modern software company.

The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains. Our work includes maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation, automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract, integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts. This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales. We are looking for engineers who enjoy solving complex workflow and systems problems, improving reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders. As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities and collaborate across teams beyond their immediate scope. What You’ll Be Doing: The AppCore Stacks squad owns the systems that create, configure, reconcile, migrate, and operate Grafana Cloud stacks at scale. A stack is the customer-facing Grafana Cloud environment that connects an organization to Grafana and the backend services it uses, including Mimir, Loki, Tempo, plugins, dashboards, data sources, and stack-level configuration. Our work sits at the intersection of product, platform, and operations. We build the control-plane services and workflows that keep stack state aligned across grafana.com, Stack State Service (SSS), Hosted Grafana, cloud regions, and the underlying Grafana Cloud infrastructure. When this domain works well, customers get reliable stack creation, safe configuration rollout, predictable migrations, and fewer manual operational interventions. Design, build, and operate reconciliation systems, including the SSS backend, to track desired stack state, detect and repair drift across stack templates, grafana.com state, Hosted Grafana, and actual customer stack configuration Collaborate across SSS, grafana.com, and deployment configurations to ensure stack lifecycle workflows remain reliable, observable, and resilient Improve operational efficiency by reducing deployment complexity (e.g., aiming for single PR regional SSS deployment) and contributing to the Stack Config Reconciliation project Manage rollout mechanisms for provisioned plugins, dashboards, data sources, Grafana versions, release channels, and stack-level configuration Support new region and cluster rollouts, including the operational paths required to bring stacks online safely in new Grafana Cloud regions Improve incident response and recovery paths for stack misalignment, reconciliation failures, plugin rollout issues, and Hosted Grafana integration failures Partner with Product, Hosted Grafana, Infrastructure, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads on customer-impacting stack lifecycle work Contribute to roadmap planning, technical design, OnCall improvements, and long-term simplification of stack operations You will help own the production behavior of the systems you build. That includes improving runbooks, dashboards, alerts, reconciliation safety, rollout controls, and recovery procedures. You should be comfortable debugging across service boundaries and making careful changes in systems that affect customer stacks Of course, there is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously. As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day. You will work closely with counterparts in other regions to provide balanced coverage and shared ownership. 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 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro). What Makes You a Great Fit: At Grafana, we actively embrace AI-assisted and agentic development practices, integrating these technologies into both our engineering workflows and the systems we deliver. We encourage our engineers to thoughtfully leverage AI tools to enhance every stage of the lifecycle, from design and implementation to testing, documentation, and operations. We also look for strategic opportunities to embed agentic capabilities within our services to eliminate toil, bolster reliability, and ensure that complex customer workflows remain resilient and safe. We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer who thrives on building production systems where correctness, scalability, and operational clarity are paramount. As a remote-first organization, you should be comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones and taking full ownership of the critical systems powering Grafana Cloud. Our team is small and operates with a high degree of independence; you will be expected to lead major projects, coordinate across service boundaries, and help define the technical direction for our domain. You will be particularly successful in this role if you enjoy solving challenges related to stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops. We value engineers who can take ambiguous lifecycle