Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations. 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 are looking for a Staff Software Engineer - SRE to help support our highest value Grafana Cloud customers by increasing the reliability of our Cloud databases that are based on Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. These databases are provided as a SaaS product from AWS, GCP, and Azure across all regions. The SRE team is embedded within the Mimir, Loki, and Tempo squads and focuses on ensuring that Grafana Cloud’s database products deliver exceptional reliability for our highest-SLA customers.

• Partner closely with product engineering squads (embedded model)
• Own production reliability for high-SLA and complex customer environments
• Design and implement automation to scale our reliability practices
• Ensure our customers meet our SLO targets
• Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models
• Proactively reduce SLO burn to prevent repeat incidents
• Serve as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
• Lead customer-impacting incident response and post-incident reviews
• Contribute to design docs and code reviews
• Influence feature design to ensure production scalability and operability
• Build automation to eliminate toil where needed
• Improve alert quality and reduce noisy escalations

• 8+ years engineering experience, 4+ in SRE/CRE/production engineering
• Strong preference for those with formal customer reliability engineering experience
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
• Strong experience with technical leadership, leading a team through projects, mentoring other engineers on the team and serving as a force-multiplier
• Experience operating multi-tenant systems in production
• Strong experience designing and implementing SLOs
• Experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Go, Python, Java, etc.)
• Experience with Linux operating systems internals, and some knowledge of networking, cloud storage, and scaling
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills
• Experience with calmly and actively participating in blame-free Incident Response, following up on actions, and writing high quality PIRs (Post Incident Reviews, a.k.a. post-mortem documents)
• Ability to reason about performance, scaling, and failure modes
• Comfortable working within an engineering team where individuals are encouraged to have a strong sense of autonomy and self-direction
• Ability to partner deeply with product engineering teams

In the UK, the base compensation range for this role is £103,958 - £124,750. 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.

• 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.

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.