Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Cloud k6 | UK | Remote

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.

This is a remote opportunity, and we would be interested in applicants in UK time zones.

The Opportunity

We are the team behind Grafana k6, Grafana Cloud k6, and Grafana Cloud Synthetics, used by teams globally to ensure resilient, high-performing systems. This opportunity is with the Grafana Cloud k6 squad, who build and operate our performance testing product. Grafana Cloud k6 is built around the OSS k6 and targeted at users looking to run performance tests at scale. Our enterprise and SaaS offerings allow customers to load test their systems by running distributed tests from 15+ regions worldwide, using hundreds of thousands of virtual users sending millions of requests per second. We ingest huge volumes of data generated by k6, which can be used to view, correlate and analyze metrics from each test. k6 is a product used by other engineers, and as such, we are looking for people enthusiastic about building high-quality tools they would want to use themselves. Due to our small teams and fast development pace, you will have a substantial and immediate impact on how the end product is architected, developed, and how the engineering team operates.

Your role will focus on establishing and scaling a cross-team culture of engineering excellence by setting standards and guiding adoption of strong engineering practices that improve reliability and operational ownership. As this foundation matures, the role is expected to expand into broader application and product development leadership, contributing architectural and technical depth beyond operational excellence.

What will you be doing?

• Contribute hands-on to the codebase by designing and implementing production-quality software.
• Guide teams in the design, development, evolution, and operation of large-scale, distributed cloud systems.
• Build and scale a strong culture of operational excellence by defining standards and coaching teams to own reliability and availability.
• Help mature SRE practices, including incident response and PIRs, on-call readiness, runbooks, alerting, observability, and release/change management.
• Establish reliability frameworks such as SLIs/SLOs and error budgets, and use them to guide prioritization and engineering trade-offs.
• Provide visibility into system health through clear operational metrics and reliability reporting.
• Participate in the on-call rotation as a primary escalation point and contribute to incident resolution.
• Influence product and system direction through design reviews, architectural discussions, and cross-team collaboration.
• Share knowledge through clear, high-quality documentation and technical communication—internally and, where appropriate, externally—to help teams build and operate systems more effectively.
• As the reliability foundation matures, grow into broader application and product development leadership, contributing architectural and technical depth beyond operations.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), 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. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

Requirements:

• Strong programming background in a modern language (Python and Go are primary, but prior experience is not required).
• Experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong experience with SRE practices, including operating and evolving production systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering concepts (e.g. incident management, observability, and failure modes).
• Strong experience of defining or applying SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, or reliability metrics.
• Experience with test automation, including performance and functional testing.
• Ability to influence engineering practices through clear technical communication, reviews, and collaboration.
• Strong interpersonal skills and ability to work effectively across teams.
• Familiarity with modern software engineering processes and delivery practices.
• Self-driven and comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy and ambiguity.
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience with containerized and cloud-native systems (Docker, Kubernetes, AWS).
• Familiarity with observability tooling and platforms (e.g. the Grafana stack).
• Experience working with Python, Go, JavaScript and/or Jsonnet.
• Experience building or operating event-driven or asynchronous systems.
• Interest in, or experience with, building testing frameworks or developer tooling.

Compensation & Rewards:

In the United Kingdom, the Base compensation range for this role is GBP 103,958 - GBP 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 - 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.