Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | Germany | Remote

About the Position

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. 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.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

We Offer

• Base compensation range: €109,709 - €131,651
• Benefits: Equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits listed here.
• Remote work: 100% remote, global culture.
• Career growth: Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Work-life balance: 30 days of annual leave per annum, including 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days.

About the Company

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. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.

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. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation 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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