Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | UK | Remote

Posted Yesterday
Be an Early Applicant
Hiring Remotely in United Kingdom
Remote
104K-125K Annually
Senior level
Software
Grafana Labs creates leading open-source tools for visualizing operational data, with 1000+ employees in 20+ countries.
The Role
Embed with product engineering squads to own production reliability for Grafana Cloud databases (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope). Design and implement SLOs, automation, and fault-tolerant patterns; lead incident response and post-incident reviews; improve observability, alerting, and scalability for high-SLA multi-tenant environments; mentor engineers and influence product design for operability.
Summary Generated by Built In

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re 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:

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer - SRE to help us support our highest value Grafana Cloud customers by increasing the reliability of our Cloud databases that are based on Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. We provide these databases 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. In this role, you will:

  • 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
  • Ensuring our customers meet our SLO targets
  • Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models
  • Proactively reduce SLO burn to prevent repeat incidents
  • Serving 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

We seek a staff software engineer operating at the intersection of customer needs, production systems, and product engineering.

What we seek:
  • 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
  • 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!)
Your day-to-day will include:
  • Regular 1:1s to with your manager and colleagues
  • Reviewing and creating SLOs, proactively investigating ways in which we can further reduce budget burn for those SLOs, which can be self-directed or as the result of learnings from incidents, and may include improvements to monitoring, automation, increasing self-healing, auto-scaling, etc.
  • Improve observability of customers within their environments
  • Designing and implementing solutions to ensure reliability and scalability of our environments can meet rapidly increasing demands
  • Develop fault-tolerant design patterns ensuring that we are considering reliability at all stages of the service lifecycle.
  • Collaborating with our Engineering Leaders to help define and influence product strategy, roadmaps and technical designs
  • Participate in PR review and collaborating with other engineers on their Design Docs
  • Teach others about Site Reliability Engineering and communicate best practices to be applied early in development of new features and functionality
  • Participate in Incident Response when applicable, including investigation through to resolution, PIR, and communication with customers via Bridge calls where necessary

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.#LI-Remote

#LI-Remote

*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. 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.

#LI-Remote

For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy. 
 

Skills Required

  • 8+ years engineering experience, 4+ years in SRE/CRE/production engineering
  • Experience with Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope or similar observability databases
  • Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure
  • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet)
  • Experience operating multi-tenant systems in production
  • Strong experience designing and implementing SLOs and per-tenant reliability models
  • Experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Go, Python, Java)
  • Knowledge of Linux operating system internals, networking, cloud storage, and scaling
  • Proven technical leadership, mentoring, and project leadership experience
  • Experience in incident response, writing high-quality post-incident reviews (PIRs), and calm incident participation
  • Strong troubleshooting, performance, and failure-mode reasoning skills
  • Ability to partner deeply with product engineering teams and influence design for operability

Grafana Labs Compensation & Benefits Highlights

The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Grafana Labs and has not been reviewed or approved by Grafana Labs.

  • Healthcare Strength Healthcare coverage is described as comprehensive, including medical, dental, and vision options with low deductibles in the US and local equivalents in other countries. Mental health support is also included, alongside wellness support that can be applied to therapy or ergonomic needs.
  • Leave & Time Off Breadth Time off is positioned as notably generous, including 30 days of paid vacation plus holidays and additional shutdown days. Parental leave and sick leave are also part of the time-off package, supporting broader work-life needs.
  • Equity Value & Accessibility Equity is presented as a standard component of compensation, with RSUs included across roles to provide ownership in company outcomes. The package framing emphasizes total compensation that combines base pay with equity and, in some cases, bonuses.

Grafana Labs Insights

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The Company
HQ: New York, New York
1,300 Employees
Year Founded: 2014

What We Do

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable monitoring and observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. There are more than 5,000 Grafana Labs customers, including Bloomberg, Citigroup, Dell Technologies, Salesforce, and TomTom, and more than 20 million users of Grafana around the world. Grafana Labs helps companies manage their observability strategies with the LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise offerings, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo) as well as extensive enterprise data source plugins, dashboard management, alerting, reporting, and security.

Why Work With Us

Clear communication is vital in a remote-first company. We hold weekly team updates, monthly all-hands calls, co-located offsites, and annual events. We've enhanced hiring, onboarding, and training with a learning management tool and quarterly bootcamps. We offer 30 vacation days plus local holidays, with equal benefits for all employees globally.

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