Staff Engineer at Grafana Labs - SRE & Distributed Systems in Columbus

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 unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives.

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 grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

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 are looking for candidates from the UK, Sweden, Spain, or Germany.

About the Role

Grafana Cloud runs Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope as multi-tenant SaaS databases across AWS, GCP, and Azure in regions worldwide. Our highest-SLA customers depend on them to run their businesses. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to keep these systems reliable at scale.

The role combines building and operating. You'll write the software, automation, and product changes that make our databases more reliable — including changes to the Mimir, Loki, and Tempo codebases where reliability calls for it. You'll also be on call for our highest-SLA customers and handle the operational work that comes with it. You'll bring a production mindset to product engineering and engineering rigor to reliability, and you'll set technical direction across squads.

What You'll Do

• Build reliability into the product. Write production code in our services, tooling, and the Mimir, Loki, and Tempo codebases that makes our databases more resilient, self-healing, and scalable as demand grows quickly.
• Build automation and platform tooling that removes toil and scales our reliability practices across regions and cloud providers.
• Lead technical design. Author design docs, review others' designs and PRs, and shape feature design so it's scalable and operable from day one.
• Own the SLO framework. Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models. Use SLO burn and incident learnings to find and fix the causes of failure in the systems themselves.
• Improve observability and alerting so we find problems before customers do, and so escalations are actionable rather than noisy.
• Be on call for our highest-SLA customers. Act as a technical escalation point for complex customer environments. Lead customer-impacting incident response, including customer bridge calls when needed, and write blameless post-incident reviews that lead to engineering fixes.
• Handle the operational work that comes from on-call. This includes investigating customer escalations, following up on incident actions, tuning capacity and configuration, and turning recurring issues into permanent fixes or automation.
• Multiply the team. Mentor engineers, teach reliability practices that teams adopt early in development, and work with engineering leadership on roadmaps and product strategy.
• We highly value those who are intellectually curious, who default to transparency, possess a high bias towards action, and who are also kind (this is important!).

On-Call

Weekday on-call is 12-hour shifts, Monday to Friday, split between North America and Europe so you cover your local working hours. Weekends are covered by a separate 24-hour rotation. You'll take a weekend shift roughly once every six to eight weeks.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time building and owning distributed systems in production.
• Strong production software skills, ideally in at least one object-oriented language. You write clean, tested code and can make targeted changes in large open-source codebases you didn't write.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: performance, scaling, and failure modes. You can reason about how a system will break before it does.
• Experience running multi-tenant systems at scale on Kubernetes in AWS, GCP, or Azure, with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Helm, or Jsonnet.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing SLOs.
• Experience being on call for production systems. You troubleshoot calmly and methodically under pressure, and you've taken part in blameless incident response and written high-quality post-incident reviews.
• Staff-level technical leadership: driving cross-team projects, setting technical direction, and making the engineers around you better.
• Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, and cloud storage.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, Prometheus, or other observability and time-series databases.
• Open-source contributions.
• Customer reliability engineering (CRE) or customer-facing escalation experience.

In Germany, the base compensation range for this role is €109,709 – €131,651. 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.

*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: 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.

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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