Senior Engineering Manager, Grafana Backend | Canada | Remote

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 position and we're considering candidates in the US or Canada (EST working hours preferred).

The Opportunity:
We are looking for an Engineering Manager to join the Grafana Backend team. Our managers take an active role in creating a thriving environment for our engineers; be it through removing blockers and impediments, facilitating cross-team collaboration and understanding, or by aiding the team in helping themselves by constantly improving and refining their working practices, you are the glue to make our deliverables happen. You’ll be responsible for managing a team of distributed engineers working across a variety of systems and helping them to perform at their best.

In Grafana Backend, our mission is to evolve the backend of the Grafana visualization product by architecting and delivering an exceptional Grafana core platform that supports our high demand service. We want users and agents to be able to leverage Grafana to observe their infrastructure as well as the lifecycle of their software in a composable and efficient fashion.

The majority of our work is on OSS Grafana, but we also work closely with customers of our commercial offerings. Our main goal is to deliver on the application platform which will unlock multi-tenancy in Grafana to meet our growing demand. We strive to deeply understand developers, both internal and those who are part of our larger community. We play an active role in research to help deliver the best developer experience. Close collaboration with Product, Docs and Customer Experience is something you will regularly be engaging in.

 

What You’ll Be Doing:

This is not an exhaustive list, and we know that people can have a wealth of knowledge in their individual backgrounds. A list of some of the things we think would be ideal in this role are:

• The core focus of the role is people. Technical skills are desirable in order to understand some of our stack and manage a highly technical team (we primarily work with Go on back-end development).
• You have a strong software engineering background and are capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenge teams to arrive at strong technical decisions together. The app platform area that this individual would support is highly technical, so a strong technical foundation is essential for success
• Delivery is another part of your responsibilities. You are able to work with your team to set milestones, clearly communicate delivery timelines and help remove impediments.
• You will work closely with stakeholders and product managers to ensure the product roadmap is defined and up-to-date. You collaborate with others to ensure the product direction aligns with our company mission and define OKRs to demonstrate that.
• You focus on quality above speed of delivery while encouraging a short feedback cycle and experimentation.
• You are comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision making, be it technical or product focussed.
• While you’re great with people and adept at managing relationships, you still keep up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts in order to maintain and enhance your understanding of the challenges your teams face.
  
  

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:

• Thrive: We have regular and frequent 1:1s to ensure that our direct reports are motivated, happy, and engaged.
• We also coach, mentor, and advise. Upwards, sideways, and every-which-ways.
• Progress over Perfection: We provide continuous feedback to engineers to ensure that they can add value, while trying to maintain a high standard.
• Seeking Diverse Perspectives: Gathering a range of opinions from both engineers and management to define upcoming features, contributing to design documents, and attending and contributing to open discussions.
• This is also reflected in maintaining headcount-- we spend quite a lot of our time reaching out to URM’s to try and diversify the voices here in Grafana, every day. We work with our PeopleOps team closely to accomplish this.
• Say:Do Ratio: We ensure features are well-defined and ready for development, and then set the wheels in motion to make sure they are delivered.
• Respectfully empowered to start up new initiatives, contribute to on-going ones, and to encourage and nurture others to do the same.
• OSS is in our DNA, and as such working with the community is something that happens regularly for us. We default to transparency and try to be as open with everyone.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 211,450 - CAD 253,740. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

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.

*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 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: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization 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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