Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng

Details

The Opportunity

Grafana Cloud moves millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second from customers' environments into a highly available, low-latency stack that processes and stores this data, and serves them to dashboards and alerting tools. The company aims to grow this to hundreds of millions per second, and it is critical that as it grows, it improves performance, increases reliability, and does so efficiently and effectively.

The Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) delivered by the Platform department provides application engineers with the tools, systems and Kubernetes clusters they need to build, deploy and run their workloads. Platform roles have an eye for engineers with a passion for performance and reliability, and who enjoy taking projects from conception to production. The Platform team organizes into squads focused on: cloud infrastructure and capacity management; security; engineering productivity; monitoring and sustainability; and US Federal compliance.

Because production services are deployed, there are on-call rotations to ensure the health of the system. Everyone at Grafana Labs tries to incorporate and use the product line up into their day-to-day, so being on call is an important way to understand the system and how people use products.

What You’ll Be Doing

The role is hiring for the Platform SysEng squad, an accelerated, cross-cutting squad focused on the maturity and scalability of the platform. SysEng is currently working across engineering with a goal of reducing new region build timelines to meet customer demands.

The Platform Engineering group manages infrastructure for teams building tools including Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Enjoy working with engineers and with management structures that support you and enable you and your team to do their very best.
• Comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key. The team operates by consensus.
• Keen on working with distributed systems.
• Eager to learn and grow; there is room for growth and development and the team has knowledge to share.
• Approach development holistically: the team owns the full life cycle of code—from writing design docs, to looking at developer feedback, and integration testing. The Platform team mainly works with Go, Python, and Shell.
• Experience with operating code, with grounding in both operator and developer spaces.

The company invests heavily in developer productivity. Modern AI coding assistants can be used as part of daily workflow (within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget. AI-assisted development is encouraged for faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—paired with strong code review and quality standards. Access to frontier models is available (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

Responsibilities (implied by role context)

• Help mature and scale the internal engineering platform.
• Work across engineering to reduce new region build timelines.
• Take ownership across the full lifecycle of code and platform reliability/performance.
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure system health.

Requirements

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems: experience shipping and operating complex systems spanning multiple teams, with evidence of technical leadership and impact.
• Demonstrable experience in system design, including deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience: solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and operational practices to keep them healthy.
• Reliability and performance ownership: comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end.
• Excellent coding and design skills: write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and lead technical designs. Go is used, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translates well.
• Comfort with AI-assisted development: curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools, ideally with practical experience integrating them into team workflow.
• Influence without authority: ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.
• Strong communicator: clear written and verbal communication across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

Bonus Points For

• Experience working in or on open source or community-based projects.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and Karpenter.
• Terraform and/or Crossplane experience.
• Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet.

Compensation & Rewards

In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 186,368 - CAD 223,642. 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 on the careers page. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Compensation ranges are country specific; if applying from a different location, the recruiter will discuss that market’s defined pay range & benefits.

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).

Equal Opportunity Employer

Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from everyone regardless of protected characteristics under local law.

Privacy Policy

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