Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE

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 looking for a Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE to join our team and ensure the reliability of our multi-tenant SaaS databases across AWS, GCP, and Azure. This is a remote opportunity 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

• Competitive salary range: £103,958 - £124,750.
• Equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits.
• 100% remote, global culture.
• Transparent communication and open decision-making.
• Innovation-driven environment with autonomy and support.
• Career growth pathways and approachable leadership.
• In-person onboarding and a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.

About the Company

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 grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.

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.