Staff Software Engineer - Platform, Application Core Services | Canada | Remote

Application Core Services (AppCore) builds the control plane behind Grafana Cloud, designing the systems that create, configure, and operate thousands of customer environments safely and reliably.

Working at the intersection of product, platform, and operations, the team develops the services that power critical customer and internal workflows, from provisioning and cloud marketplace integrations to billing and customer lifecycle management. As Grafana Cloud continues to scale, we're solving complex distributed systems challenges around reliability, automation, and operational efficiency.

We're looking for engineers who enjoy building large-scale backend systems, improving developer experience, and leading technical initiatives that have a direct impact on both our customers and the engineers building on our platform.

As a remote-first, open source company, we value collaboration, ownership, and diverse perspectives, with opportunities to contribute across teams and to the broader OSS community.

You'll help build and operate the control plane behind Grafana Cloud. The team owns the systems responsible for creating, configuring, reconciling, migrating, and operating customer stacks at scale.

In this role you'll:

• →Design and build distributed backend systems that keep customer stack state consistent across Grafana Cloud.
• →Develop reconciliation and automation workflows that improve reliability, reduce operational complexity, and safely manage infrastructure changes.
• →Lead technical initiatives spanning multiple services and partner closely with Product, Infrastructure, Hosted Grafana, and adjacent platform teams.
• →Improve deployment workflows, regional expansion, rollout safety, and incident recovery across thousands of customer environments.
• →Own the production systems you build, including observability, operational tooling, on-call, and continuous reliability improvements.
• →As a remote-first team, we share ownership through a global follow-the-sun on-call rotation and invest heavily in AI-assisted development with access to modern coding tools and frontier models.

We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer who enjoys solving complex distributed systems problems and leading technical work from idea to production.

You'll likely be successful if you:

• Have experience building and operating large-scale SaaS or cloud platforms.
• Have strong backend engineering experience in Go or another systems language, and are comfortable learning new technologies.
• Have experience with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Enjoy solving problems around distributed systems, eventual consistency, stateful services, and system reliability.
• Can independently lead projects, navigate ambiguity, and influence technical direction across teams.
• Care about writing clean, maintainable software and improving the developer experience.
• Have experience participating in production operations, incident response, and on-call.
• Are comfortable working in a remote-first, highly collaborative environment.

We'd especially love to hear from you if you have experience with:

• Kubernetes operators, reconcilers, or control plane development.
• Go and TypeScript/Node.js.
• Terraform, Flux, Argo, Jsonnet, Tanka, or similar infrastructure tooling.
• SaaS provisioning, customer lifecycle systems, or multi-tenant platforms.
• Solving problems related to configuration drift, partial failures, or cross-service consistency.

• 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.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• 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.
• Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. 
• Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *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 Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

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