Senior Software Engineer - Databases, SRE

Details

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer - SRE to help support Grafana Cloud’s highest value 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.

What You’ll Be Doing

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. 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
• 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

Of course, there is an on-call component to this role. 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 and 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. 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 and proactively investigating ways to reduce budget burn for those SLOs (self-directed or based on incident learnings), including improvements to monitoring, automation, increasing self-healing, auto-scaling, etc.
• Improve observability of customers within their environments
• Design and implement solutions to ensure reliability and scalability of our environments to meet rapidly increasing demands
• Develop fault-tolerant design patterns with reliability considered at all stages of the service lifecycle
• Collaborate with engineering leaders to help define and influence product strategy, roadmaps, and technical designs
• Participate in PR review and collaborate with other engineers on Design Docs
• Teach others about Site Reliability Engineering and communicate best practices to be applied early in development
• 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 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 participating in blame-free Incident Response, following up on actions, and writing high quality PIRs (Post Incident Reviews)
• Ability to reason about performance, scaling, and failure modes
• Comfortable working in an engineering team where individuals are encouraged to have strong autonomy and self-direction
• Ability to partner deeply with product engineering teams
• Intellectual curiosity, defaulting to transparency, high bias towards action, and being kind

Compensation & Rewards

In Canada, the compensation range for this role is CAD 164,490 - CAD 197,389. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• Balance is Key (global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days; compliance with local legislation where applicable)