Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases

• Operate and evolve 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure.
• Diagnose and eliminate cross-layer failure modes such as object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, and query performance regressions.
• Design safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale.
• Improve observability, automation, and operational ergonomics.
• Partner closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance.
• Work directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, and compression trade-offs.
• Serve as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents.
• Own relationships with system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others.
• Review and define SLOs for shared database infrastructure, proactively reducing error budgets through monitoring, automation, scaling strategies, and system design improvements.
• Improve the diagnosability of core streaming and database systems in production.
• Implement solutions that ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure.
• Develop fault-tolerant patterns that account for distributed system realities.
• Plan and execute safe upgrades and rollouts across dozens of production clusters.
• Collaborate with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture, roadmap priorities, and long-term strategy.
• Participate in PR review and contribute to design documents, automation, tooling, and code improvements that reduce operational risk.
• Share best practices and distributed systems knowledge with partner teams.
• Participate in incident response from investigation through resolution and post-incident reviews.

Technologies:

• AWS
• Azure
• Cloud
• GCP
• Grafana
• Helm
• Support
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Terraform
• AI
• Backbone
• ClickHouse
• Cassandra
• Kafka
• OSS
• Power Query
• Security
• Snowflake

• 6+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
• Experience operating distributed systems in production, such as streaming systems, analytical databases, or large-scale storage backends.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, plus familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Helm, Terraform, or Jsonnet.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems design and large-scale system trade-offs.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language; Go is preferred but not required.
• Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, cloud storage, and performance/scaling behavior.
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews.
• Clear communicator who can collaborate across teams and work autonomously.
• Curious, pragmatic, action-oriented, and kind.

We are Grafana Labs, a remote-first, open-source company with more than 20M users of Grafana around the world and over 3,000 customers managing observability with the Grafana LGTM Stack. We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer for our Grafana Databases Managed Services team, a newly formed squad within the Databases department. This is a remote opportunity for applicants in UK time zones only. The role is fully remote, and we support a global, collaborative culture built on transparency, autonomy, trust, and open-source values. We offer equity, bonus eligibility, RSUs, and benefits, along with a 30-day annual leave policy that includes Grafana Shutdown Days. We also provide in-person onboarding, strong career growth opportunities, and a high-trust, low-ego environment with meaningful work at scale.