Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE

Details

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.

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.

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.

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 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

Compensation and Benefits

In Spain, the Base compensation range for this role is €94,025 - €112,830. 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.

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; 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days)