Staff Backend Engineer (Grafana, Distributed Systems)

TL;DR

Staff Backend Engineer (Grafana, Distributed Systems): Operating and evolving critical shared database infrastructure for Grafana Cloud's next-generation products (Mimir, Loki, Tempo) with an accent on diagnosing cross-layer failure modes, designing safe upgrade strategies, and improving observability and automation. Focus on leading complex initiatives across high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure, establishing best practices for reliability, and driving architectural improvements.

Location: Remote, restricted to Canadian time zones

Salary: CAD 186,368 – CAD 223,642

Company

hirify.global is a remote-first, open-source company providing observability solutions with over 20M users and helping more than 3,000 companies manage their observability strategies.

What you will do

• Operate and evolve 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure powering Grafana Cloud.
• Diagnose and eliminate cross-layer failure modes, improving observability and operational ergonomics.
• Design and implement safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale for distributed systems.
• Partner with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, and query performance.
• Lead complex initiatives, define technical direction, and establish best practices for SLOs, scaling limits, and reliability.
• Serve as a primary escalation point, participate in on-call rotations, and own vendor relationships for critical systems.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform, production, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
• Experience with high-throughput streaming systems, analytical/storage backends, or large-scale database infrastructure (e.g., Kafka, Postgres, Cassandra, Snowflake).
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform).
• Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language (Go preferred).
• Ability to lead complex technical efforts, influence technical direction, and align teams around reliability improvements.
• Clear communication skills to collaborate across teams and work autonomously.

Culture & Benefits

• 100% Remote, global culture with talent from around the world.
• Work in a high-growth, innovation-driven environment with transparent communication.
• Open source roots and empowered teams with a high trust, low ego culture.
• Defined career growth pathways and approachable leadership.
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days.
• Access to modern AI coding assistants and frontier models with a company-funded usage budget.