At a Glance
- Tasks: Support Grafana Cloud customers by enhancing database reliability and automating processes.
- Company: Join Grafana Labs, a leader in open observability with a global remote team.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, equity, bonuses, and flexible remote work options.
- Other info: Dynamic, innovative environment with opportunities for personal and professional growth.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on high-profile projects while working with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: 8+ years in engineering, strong SRE experience, and expertise in Kubernetes.
The predicted salary is between 103958 - 124750 £ per year.
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries. 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.
This is a remote opportunity and we are looking for candidates from the UK, Sweden, Spain or Germany.
About the role:
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
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.
Remote Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | UK | Remote in Portsmouth employer: Grafana Labs
Grafana Labs is an exceptional employer that champions a fully remote work culture, allowing you to collaborate with a diverse team of over 1,600 professionals across 40+ countries. With a strong emphasis on transparency, autonomy, and innovation, employees are encouraged to grow through meaningful work and continuous learning opportunities. The company offers competitive compensation, equity options, and a supportive environment where your contributions directly impact the reliability of cutting-edge observability solutions for high-profile clients.
