This role focuses on building and operating highly reliable, multi-tenant SaaS databases for Grafana Cloud. The Staff Software Engineer will write production code, develop automation, and lead technical design to enhance system resilience and scalability. Responsibilities include defining SLOs, improving observability, and providing on-call support for high-SLA customers, requiring 8+ years of experience with distributed systems.
This is a remote opportunity and we are looking for candidates from the UK, Sweden, Spain or Germany.
About the role:
Grafana Cloud runs Mimir, Loki, Tempo and Pyroscope as multi-tenant SaaS databases across AWS, GCP and Azure in regions worldwide. Our highest-SLA customers depend on them to run their businesses. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to keep these systems reliable at scale.
The role combines building and operating. You’ll write the software, automation and product changes that make our databases more reliable, including changes to the Mimir, Loki and Tempo codebases where reliability calls for it. You’ll also be on call for our highest-SLA customers and handle the operational work that comes with it. You’ll bring a production mindset to product engineering and engineering rigor to reliability, and you’ll set technical direction across squads.
What You’ll Do
- Build reliability into the product. Write production code in our services, tooling and the Mimir, Loki and Tempo codebases that makes our databases more resilient, self-healing and scalable as demand grows quickly.
- Build automation and platform tooling that removes toil and scales our reliability practices across regions and cloud providers.
- Lead technical design. Author design docs, review others’ designs and PRs, and shape feature design so it’s scalable and operable from day one.
- Own the SLO framework. Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models. Use SLO burn and incident learnings to find and fix the causes of failure in the systems themselves.
- Improve observability and alerting so we find problems before customers do, and so escalations are actionable rather than noisy.
- Be on call for our highest-SLA customers. Act as a technical escalation point for complex customer environments. Lead customer-impacting incident response, including customer bridge calls when needed, and write blameless post-incident reviews that lead to engineering fixes.
- Handle the operational work that comes from on-call. This includes investigating customer escalations, following up on incident actions, tuning capacity and configuration, and turning recurring issues into permanent fixes or automation.
- Multiply the team. Mentor engineers, teach reliability practices that teams adopt early in development, and work with engineering leadership on roadmaps and product strategy.
- 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!)
On-Call
Weekday on-call is 12-hour shifts, Monday to Friday, split between North America and Europe so you cover your local working hours. Weekends are covered by a separate 24-hour rotation. You’ll take a weekend roughly once every six to eight weeks.
What We’re Looking For:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time building and owning distributed systems in production.
- Strong production software skills, ideally in at least one object-oriented language. You write clean, tested code and can make targeted changes in large open-source codebases you didn’t write.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems: performance, scaling and failure modes. You can reason about how a system will break before it does.
- Experience running multi-tenant systems at scale on Kubernetes in AWS, GCP or Azure, with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, Helm or Jsonnet.
- Hands-on experience designing and implementing SLOs.
- Experience being on call for production systems. You troubleshoot calmly and methodically under pressure, and you’ve taken part in blameless incident response and written high-quality post-incident reviews.
- Staff-level technical leadership: driving cross-team projects, setting technical direction and making the engineers around you better.
- Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking and cloud storage.
Nice to Have:
- Experience with Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, Prometheus or other observability and time-series databases.
- Open-source contributions.
- Customer reliability engineering (CRE) or customer-facing escalation experience.
In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is €109,709 - €131,651. 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.
*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.
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