Remote Engineering Manager - Platform - Usage | UK | Remote in Canterbury

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). 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. You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

This is a remote position. We are considering candidates in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Ireland and the UK only.

The Opportunity:

Application Core Services (AppCore) is a group within Platform, in the Foundations department. Foundations produces the Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) and partners closely with our Cloud, Enterprise, and Grafana teams. Our team develops the essential systems driving Grafana's business operations. We utilize the grafana.com platform to engineer bespoke integrations and solutions that unify the diverse technical ecosystem of a modern software enterprise. The team owns important domain areas that help keep both our customer workflows and internal business processes running smoothly. AppCore is made up of multiple squads, each focused on one or more of these domains. Our work includes maintaining the billing engine responsible for customer usage calculation, automating provisioning after a customer signs a contract, integrating with cloud marketplaces such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, and building and maintaining the user portal our customers rely on to manage their accounts. This is a team working at the intersection of product, platform, and business operations. The systems we build are critical to how Grafana scales. We are looking for a proven leader who enjoys guiding teams in solving complex workflow and systems problems, driving improvements in reliability and developer experience, and building software that directly supports both customers and internal stakeholders.

As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. Engineering Managers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities and collaborate across teams beyond their immediate scope.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Manage and grow a distributed team of engineers, conducting regular 1:1s, providing consistent feedback, and supporting individual performance and career development.
• Partner with product management and engineering leadership to shape the Usage squad's roadmap, strategy, and OKRs, ensuring alignment with overall company mission and customer impact.
• Guide the team through the full project lifecycle, from early technical design and scoping to delivery and post-launch iteration, ensuring high-quality and timely outcomes within the Usage domain (e.g., billing engine, cost management and billing app, reconciliation systems).
• Act as a project manager, facilitating collaboration with Product, DealOps, GTM, Pricing and Monetization, Support, and adjacent AppCore squads to remove blockers and ensure coordinated delivery across service boundaries.
• Foster a high-trust, security-first team culture that embraces thoughtful AI-assisted development practices to enhance engineering workflows and eliminate toil.
• Contribute to hiring and talent acquisition efforts, partnering with People Ops to attract and retain a diverse group of engineers.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Experienced in people management, including conducting regular 1:1s, delivering candid feedback, and supporting career growth and performance conversations.
• You are a leader who empowers engineers, focusing on setting clear direction, aligning on outcomes, and identifying risks early rather than providing task-level oversight.
• Transparent and direct by default; you advocate clearly for your reports and proactively resolve ambiguity or conflicts, especially when priorities collide.
• A strong communicator who thrives in a fully remote and globally distributed environment, comfortable collaborating asynchronously across time zones and cultures.
• You take initiative and can move work forward in complex, systems-focused problem spaces, such as stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops.

Requirements:

• Minimum 2 years of experience managing software engineering teams.
• Prior experience as an Individual Contributor (IC) in a related engineering role for at least 3 years.
• A strong software engineering background, ideally including experience in backend systems (like Go), sufficient to credibly engage in technical design discussions and challenge the team toward strong decisions.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Demonstrated ability to manage delivery across multiple concurrent projects, align stakeholders with competing priorities, and clearly communicate risks and timelines.
• Comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision-making.
• Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding technical decisions in real-world user and business impact.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling and an expectation that you are curious and comfortable integrating AI-powered tools into a team's workflow.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience with high-volume billing systems, usage metering, and customer-facing cost management applications (like CMAB).
• Practical experience implementing and automating complex pricing logic, promotions, discounts, rebilling, and usage forgiveness, while ensuring strong auditability.
• Familiarity with cloud marketplace integrations (AWS, Azure, GCP) and compliance or system refactoring related to IT General Controls or Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
• Experience working on SaaS provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, or customer lifecycle systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns, operators, reconcilers, or desired-state systems.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects.

Compensation & Rewards:

In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is GBP 103,000 - GBP 129,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
• Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.