At a Glance
- Tasks: Support Grafana Cloud customers by enhancing database reliability and automating processes.
- Company: Join Grafana Labs, a remote-first tech company with a global collaborative culture.
- Benefits: Enjoy competitive salary, equity, bonus opportunities, and 30 days annual leave.
- Other info: Be part of a passionate team that values transparency, autonomy, and career growth.
- Why this job: Make a real impact in a fast-paced environment while working with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: 8+ years engineering experience, strong SRE skills, and Kubernetes expertise required.
The predicted salary is between 103958 - 124750 £ per year.
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions.
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
- Ensure our customers meet our SLO targets
- Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models
- Proactively reduce SLO burn to prevent repeat incidents
- Serve 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, 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.
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).
- 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.
Your day-to-day will include:
- Regular 1:1s with your manager and colleagues
- Reviewing and creating SLOs, proactively investigating ways in which we can further reduce budget burn for those SLOs
- Improve observability of customers within their environments
- Designing and implementing solutions to ensure reliability and scalability of our environments
- 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
- Participate in Incident Response when applicable, including investigation through to resolution, PIR, and communication with customers via Bridge calls where necessary
In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is 103,958 - 124,750. 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
Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law.
Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | UK | Remote in London employer: Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs is an exceptional employer that fosters a dynamic and innovative work culture, particularly for the AI-Powered Remote Regional Marketing Lead role in the United Kingdom. With a strong emphasis on employee growth and development, we offer unique opportunities to leverage cutting-edge AI technologies while collaborating with a talented team. Our commitment to work-life balance and a supportive environment makes Grafana Labs an ideal place for professionals seeking meaningful and rewarding careers.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | UK | Remote in London
✨Join Local Tech Meetups
Get out there and mingle with fellow developers by joining local tech meetups. It’s a fantastic way to meet people who might be working at Grafana Labs or know someone who does. Plus, you can pick up some trendy tech skills and trends while you're at it!
✨Contribute to Open Source Projects
Show off your coding chops by jumping into open-source projects. Not only does this give you practical experience, but it also gets you noticed in the dev community. You'll create a killer portfolio that speaks volumes about your skills to Grafana Labs.
✨Tap into Online Developer Communities
Don’t underestimate the power of online developer communities like GitHub, Stack Overflow, and even Reddit. Participate in discussions, share your projects, and build your visibility. We can often find opportunities through these channels that can lead to a full-time gig at companies like Grafana Labs.
✨Explore Job Boards Specifically for Tech Roles
Keep your eyes peeled on job boards that focus on tech roles. Sites like TechCareers or Stack Overflow Jobs can often have listings for companies like Grafana Labs that might not show up on broader job sites. Make it a habit to check these regularly, and don’t hesitate to apply directly through our website!
We think you need these skills to ace Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | UK | Remote in London
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.
Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Grafana Labs.
Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Grafana Labs and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!
Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!
How to prepare for a job interview at Grafana Labs
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Grafana Labs uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
