Senior Software Engineer - Identity and Access | Canada | Remote
Job Description
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 opportunity and we would be interested in applicants from Canadian AST, EST, MST, and CST time zones only at this time.
Senior Software Engineer - Identity and Access
The Opportunity:
Every day, millions of users rely on Grafana to monitor the health and performance of their critical systems, from software applications to factories and even space shuttles. Our mission is two-fold: to provide a seamless and effortless sign-in experience for all users, and to ensure administrators have complete peace of mind, knowing that every user has secure access to precisely the data and functionality they need.
The Identity and Access team at Grafana manages all aspects of authentication and authorization, working across both our open-source and proprietary codebases. Our primary focus is on enhancing the scalability and streamlining the user experience for authentication and authorization. This involves both developing new features and maintaining current functionality, while also providing essential support to both our customer base and the wider community. We are completely redesigning Grafana's authentication at the edge, so this is a great opportunity to work on cutting edge authentication protocols and flows.
Our code paths are central to the critical hot paths across Grafana's services, making every millisecond of performance essential. We are dedicated to accommodating the diverse and evolving needs of every team we support.
What You’ll Be Doing:
You will work alongside your teammates to develop and maintain our authentication and authorization stack, which is largely built on open source tooling. We actively implement cutting-edge authentication and authorization protocols and systems, such as MCP OAuth (OAuth 2.1) and OpenFGA (Zanzibar), rather than relying on off-the-shelf components.
- Approximately 65% of your time will be dedicated to backend development (Golang), 25% to operations, and 10% to frontend adjustments
- Develop and maintain features for Grafana Cloud's internal and customer-facing authorization stack
- Contribute to the design and implementation of long horizon, scalable systems in the critical path of user interaction
- Build prototypes and present your ideas as part of a cross-functional team
- Stay up to date with the latest changes in Authorization and Authentication
- Grow to represent Grafana Labs in meetups and conferences
As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.
What Makes You a Great Fit
- Hands-on experience delivering distributed systems written in Go
- Experience building and operating low-latency, high-throughput services in distributed systems.
- Proven ability to coordinate and distribute tasks among team members within the scope of exceptionally large projects.
- Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and work as part of a cross-functional team and quickly gather and build your knowledge
- Strong understanding of modern identity standards and threat models (OAuth 2.x / 2.1, OIDC, SAML)
- Strong understanding of SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and how reliability impacts product decisions.
- Proficient written and verbal communication skills in English
Bonus Points For:
- Experience working with OpenFGA
- Experience working in security critical environments
- Experience contributing to or maintaining Open Source projects
- Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 164,490 - CAD 197,389. 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.
*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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