Staff AI Engineer - Grafana Ops, AI/ML | Canada | Remote

Staff AI Engineer

At Grafana, we build observability tools that help users understand, respond to, and improve their systems – regardless of scale, complexity, or tech stack. The Grafana AI teams play a key role in this mission by helping users make sense of complex observability data through AI-driven features. These capabilities reduce toil, lower the barrier of domain expertise, and surface meaningful signals from noisy environments.

We're looking for an AI Software Engineer with a strong software engineering background, a quick iteration mindset, and a passion for experimentation – balanced by a focus on shipping and scaling impactful features that deliver value to users. You'll work closely with cross-functional teams to develop, test, and ship AI-powered features that contribute to improving infrastructure and observability quality through automation, while also expanding the capabilities of AI agents across the observability stack to assist users with incident response. As the team matures, there's a broad opportunity to expand or redefine this role based on impact and initiative.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Build and deliver AI solutions: Take ownership of developing high-performance AI features to help users detect, triage, and resolve incidents using observability data and tools.
• Rapid experimentation and iteration: Implement a highly iterative process where you quickly prototype, test, and validate with real users, including shipping and evolving LLM- or agent-powered workflows for incident lifecycle management and automated analysis tasks.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work with data analysts, product managers, and designers to shape AI-driven product features, including integration of agentic components with internal tools, alerting systems, runbooks, and developer workflows.
• Utilize AI tools effectively: Use AI and automation tools to enhance both product functionality and your own development workflows.
• Effective communication: You'll be working in a highly dynamic and collaborative environment, so we need someone who can communicate effectively and contribute across teams.
• Ownership and impact: Take full ownership of the AI solutions you develop, ensuring they are not only innovative but also scalable, maintainable, and aligned with real user workflows.

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:

• Strong engineering skills: Solid experience building production software systems (backend and / or full stack). You're a self-starter, capable of tackling complex engineering problems with minimal supervision.
• AI experience with a practical mindset: You're familiar with AI technologies and frameworks, and you focus on delivering high-quality solutions that work in the real world, not just in theory.
• Quick iteration and experimentation: You're comfortable releasing prototypes, collecting feedback, and iterating with a pragmatic mindset.
• Proven initiative: You take ownership and drive projects forward, pushing boundaries to find the most impactful solutions. You can deal with ambiguity and are able to define scope where things are loosely defined.
• Collaborative attitude: You communicate effectively with peers, product managers, and designers. You're open to feedback, and you bring a solutions-oriented mindset to the table.

Requirements:

• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering, and building applications powered by GenAI.
• Proven track record of delivering software that made it into production and is actively used by users.
• Exposure to working in cloud-native environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience using observability tools to understand and troubleshoot system behavior.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience building or working with agent frameworks or multi-agent workflows.
• Experience with infrastructure / devops related tooling: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform or similar for deployments.
• Familiarity with model fine-tuning techniques.
• Experience building observability tooling.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Canada, the base compensation range for this role is CAD 186,368 - CAD 230,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. 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.

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.