Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, SRE United Kingdom Remote
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Job description
The SRE team is embedded within the Mimir and Loki squads and focuses on ensuring that Grafana Cloud's database products deliver exceptional reliability for our highest-SLA customers. We seek a senior engineer operating at the intersection of customer needs, production systems, and product engineering. 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
Of course, there is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously. As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day. You will work closely with counterparts in other regions to provide balanced coverage and shared ownership.
We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups-always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- 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
Requirements
- 6+ years engineering experience, 3+ 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.).
- 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!)
Benefits & conditions
- UK; London; Birmingham; Manchester; Glasgow; Liverpool; Leeds; Edinburgh; Bristol; Cardiff; Nottingham
- Contract
- Published: 14 hours ago
- £91,755 - £110,106 a year
Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies - including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay - manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).
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., In United Kingdom, the compensation range for this role is GBP 91,755 - GBP 110,106. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes-RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.
