Staff Software Engineer, Grafana Labs
Grafana Databases, Managed Services
$175-210k
+ Equity
The open and composable observability platform
Be an early applicant
The open and composable observability platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$175-210k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unite data, no matter where it lives, and empower its users to analyze, take action, and make smart decisions.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles
- Experience with high-throughput streaming systems, analytical or storage backends, or large-scale database infrastructure. Examples of these include Kafka, Redpanda, WarpStream, Postgres, ClickHouse, Snowflake, or Cassandra
- Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
- Experience leading or driving complex technical efforts, even without formal management responsibilities
- Ability to influence technical direction and align teams around reliability improvements
- Strong understanding of distributed systems failure modes in multi-cloud environments
- Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language (Go 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
- Intellectually curious, transparent, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)
What the job involves
- The Managed Services team is a newly formed squad within the Databases department
- It owns and operates shared, production-critical infrastructure that powers Grafana Cloud’s next-generation database products (Mimir, Loki, and Tempo)
- Today, this includes operating 100+ WarpStream clusters across multiple cloud providers and regions, with continued growth anticipated for the future
- WarpStream acts as the streaming backbone for ingestion and read/write decoupling across databases
- It sits directly on the hot path for metrics, logs, and traces, handling high-throughput, multi-consumer workloads at massive scale
- In addition to streaming infrastructure, the team works closely with high-volume analytical and storage systems that power query-heavy and aggregation-heavy workloads, where latency, compression behavior, storage layout, and scaling characteristics matter deeply
- As a Staff Engineer on Managed Services, you will operate at both the system and team level. You will help shape how we run and evolve shared database infrastructure while remaining deeply hands-on in production. This involves:
- Operating and evolving 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure
- Diagnosing and eliminating cross-layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.)
- Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale
- Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics
- Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance
- Working directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade-offs, etc
- Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
- Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others
- Help define and evolve the technical direction for operating WarpStream and adjacent shared database systems at scale
- Lead complex initiatives such as migrations, rollout improvements, and reliability investments
- Establish best practices around SLOs, scaling limits, failure isolation, and change safety
- Investigate and drive resolution of multi-layer incidents spanning storage, compute, networking, and control-plane dependencies
- Identify systemic risks across 100+ clusters and contribute architectural improvements that reduce recurring issues
- Improve systems toil and operational ergonomics with automation
- Partner with database and platform teams to align on strategy and long-term scalability
- Mentor and support engineers as the team matures
- As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must
- 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
- This role blends deep distributed systems work with the opportunity to influence how the team approaches reliability, scaling, and operational excellence
- Regular 1:1s with your manager and close collaboration with teammates across regions, helping shape how the team operates and matures
- Defining and evolving SLO strategy for shared database infrastructure, identifying systemic reliability gaps and driving long-term error budget improvements
- Setting standards for diagnosability across core streaming and database systems in production
- Leading complex initiatives across high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure
- Designing and promoting fault-tolerant architectural patterns that address distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbors, and control-plane dependencies
- Defining rollout, migration, and upgrade safety practices used across dozens of production clusters
- Partnering with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture decisions, roadmap prioritization, and long-term scalability strategy
- Leading design discussions and reviewing PRs with a focus on reducing operational risk and increasing system resilience
- Raising the bar for practices across teams by mentoring engineers and sharing distributed systems knowledge
- Playing a key role in high-impact incident response, guiding investigation, driving root cause analysis, and ensuring durable remediation through strong post-incident reviews
Our take
Observability plays a crucial role in software development, where dashboards are pivotal for monitoring the health of IT infrastructure across an organization. However, for developers, the frustration of spending unnecessary time navigating between different dashboards to find the latest information detracts from valuable programming time.
Grafana collaborates closely with its clients to create customizable observability platforms, striving to enhance efficiency in observability. Its offerings include cloud-based data structures, dashboards, API plugins, and collaboration tools. Currently, Grafana boasts over 25M users globally, with a customer base exceeding 5,000, including prominent names like Bloomberg, PJ Morgan Chase, eBay, PayPal, and Sony.
While Grafana provides free plans with a simplified tool package, the Grafana Enterprise Stack offers customized observability solutions on a monthly subscription basis. The company's ongoing strategy revolves around continually improving Grafana to meet users' demands, enhancing functionality with each iteration, and fostering community engagement by enabling users to share their Grafana dashboards with the broader open-source community.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
49% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Aug 2024
$270m
SERIES D
Apr 2022
$240m
SERIES D
Total funding: $805.2m
Company benefits
- Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
- Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
- Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
- Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
- Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
- Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
- Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
- Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption
- Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
Company HQ
Financial District, New York, NY
Leadership
Raj Dutt
(Co-Founder & CEO)Currently a Board Member at NSONE. Previously founded Voxel where they served as the CEO for 12 years. They also served as the Senior Vice President of Technology at Internap Network Services.
Torkel Ödegaard
(Co-Founder)Graduated from Mälardalen University with a Master's in Computer Science. Founder of Coding Instinct. Previously worked as a Consultant at H&M, Avega, and Ebay.
Anthony Wood
(Co-Founder)Previously worked at Visa and Voxel as a Senior Systems Engineer. They also have Systems Engineering experience at PalVision and iiNet.
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