Senior Software Engineer - Session Replay | Canada | Remote

<div class="content-intro"><p>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.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at <u><span><a href="http://grafana.com" target="_blank">grafana.com</a></span></u> and follow us on <u><span><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a></span></u> and <u><span><a href="https://twitter.com/grafana" target="_blank">X</a></span></u><u>.</u></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><h4><strong>This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from Canadian <span style="text-decoration: underline;">EST time zones only.</span>&nbsp;</strong></h4> <h2>Senior Software Engineer - Session Replay</h2> <h4><strong>The Opportunity:</strong></h4> <p>The Session Replay squad is building a new Grafana Cloud product that helps our customers to understand what users actually experienced when something goes wrong.</p> <p><a href="https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/monitor-applications/session-replay/">Session Replay</a> connects frontend signals (errors, performance, synthetic checks) to concrete session-level evidence, enabling faster and more confident investigation of production issues.</p> <p>This team works at the intersection of:</p> <ul> <li>frontend observability,</li> <li>backend data processing and storage at scale,</li> <li>debugging workflows across products,</li> <li>privacy and access control,</li> <li>performance and cost constraints at scale.</li> </ul> <p><a href="https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/monitor-applications/session-replay/">Session Replay</a> is still early, which means you’ll help shape both what we build and how it fits into Grafana Cloud. A key part of our next phase is evolving the backend architecture of capturing sessions, including a migration toward columnar/analytical solution as a primary storage and query engine for high-volume session data.</p> <p>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 new perspective to the software. We are looking for Senior Software Engineers who are passionate about working with data and providing seamless experiences for our customers to join our growing team! Our stack is Golang, Typescript and React, but we build tools for people using many other stacks.&nbsp;</p> <h4><strong>What You’ll Be Doing:</strong></h4> <p>As a Senior Software Engineer, you will operate as a technical leader and systems thinker, driving both product direction and architectural evolution, specifically, you will:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Own end-to-end technical direction for Session Replay, </strong>spanning frontend, backend, and data systems</li> <li><strong>Drive the evolution of our backend architecture, including:</strong></li> <ul> <li>Designing systems around columnar/analytical data storage for large-scale session data<strong>&nbsp;</strong></li> <li>Defining data models, ingestion pipelines, and query patterns</li> </ul> <li><strong>Lead the design of investigation workflows, </strong>connecting replay with logs, metrics, traces and other telemetry across Grafana Cloud</li> <li><strong>Make high-leverage architectural decisions</strong> that impact multiple teams and products</li> <li>Partner with teams across Grafana (Frontend Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, Core Grafana) to build <strong>cohesive cross-product experiences</strong></li> <li><strong>Engage directly with customers</strong> - joining calls, gathering structured feedback, and helping customers instrument and adopt Session Replay successfully.&nbsp;</li> <li>Improve engineering standards, patterns, and operational practices within the team</li> <li>Mentor engineers and help grow technical leadership within the team</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Technologies you'll work with:</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Go (backend services and APIs)</li> <li>Columnar/Analytical data storage (core data storage and querying)</li> <li>Object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob Storage) and MySQL&nbsp;</li> <li>TypeScript / React (user-facing workflows)</li> <li>Grafana ecosystem (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, etc.)</li> </ul> <p>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 with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.</p> <h4><strong>What Makes You a Great Fit:&nbsp;</strong></h4> <ul> <li>You are <strong>comfortable working in a remote-first company</strong>; communication is key.</li> <li>For us, working together means being <strong>collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful</strong>. We operate by consensus. You can contribute to a discussion, disagree constructively, and commit to the team’s decision. You are able to communicate design decisions clearly in written and spoken English.</li> <li><strong>Ability to reason about data-intensive systems</strong> (ingestion, storage, querying, cost trade-offs)</li> <li>You are <strong>comfortable owning features in ambiguous problem spaces</strong>. We are a small team, working remotely, on a product that will be used by engineers all over the world – the ability to work on your own is crucial.</li> <li>You have a good understanding of <strong>a software development process that takes a user-centered approach</strong>. You easily build an understanding of the users’ context and goals which will help you build the right solution with the maximum value.</li> <li>You enjoy <strong>working on complex solutions</strong> – Grafana is a highly technological solution and has avid followers who rely on it every day and who care deeply about their workflows. You value code maintainability, readability &amp; automation.</li> <li>You use <strong>AI tools as a natural part of your engineering workflow</strong> - whether for accelerating exploration, code review, or reasoning through design tradeoffs - and you're thoughtful about where they help and where they don't.</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Bonus Points For:</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Experience with columnar/analytical databases</li> <li>Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Sentry, etc.).</li> <li>Experience building debugging or developer-focused tools.</li> <li>Familiarity with privacy, security, and access control in data-heavy systems</li> <li>Experience working on performance-sensitive systems (large datasets, real-t