Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | UK | Remote

This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants living in UK time zones only at this time.

The Managed Services team is a newly formed squad within the Databases department. It owns and operates shared, production‑critical infrastructure that powers Grafana Cloud’s next‑generation database products (Mimir, Loki, and Tempo). Today, this includes operating 100+ WarpStream clusters across multiple cloud providers and regions, with continued growth anticipated for the future. WarpStream acts as the streaming backbone for ingestion and read/write decoupling across databases. It sits directly on the hot path for metrics, logs, and traces, handling high‑throughput, multi‑consumer workloads at massive scale. In addition to streaming infrastructure, the team works closely with high‑volume analytical and storage systems that power query‑heavy and aggregation‑heavy workloads, where latency, compression behaviour, storage layout, and scaling characteristics matter deeply.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Operating and evolving 100+ multi‑cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure
• Diagnosing and eliminating cross‑layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control‑plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.)
• Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale
• Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics
• Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan‑out, and query performance
• Working directly with distributed systems behaviour, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade‑offs, etc.
• Serving as a primary escalation point and on‑call for relevant incidents
• Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others.
• Providing guidance and regular updates via video calls, requiring an independent attitude and strong communication skills.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Regular 1:1s with your manager and close collaboration with teammates across regions
• Reviewing and defining SLOs for shared database infrastructure, proactively reducing error budgets through improvements to monitoring, automation, scaling strategies, and system design
• Improving the diagnosability of core streaming and database systems in production, where possible.
• Implementing solutions that ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of high‑throughput, multi‑cloud infrastructure
• Developing fault‑tolerant patterns that account for distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbours, and control‑plane dependencies
• Planning and executing safe upgrades and rollouts across dozens of production clusters
• Collaborating with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture, roadmap priorities, and long‑term strategy
• Participating in PR review and contributing to design documents, automation, tooling, and code improvements that reduce operational risk
• Sharing best practices and distributed systems knowledge with partner teams
• Participating in incident response, from investigation through resolution and post‑incident reviews (PIR)

Requirements:

• 6+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
• Experience operating distributed systems in production (e.g., streaming systems, analytical databases, large‑scale storage backends). Examples include Kafka, Redpanda, WarpStream, Postgres, ClickHouse, Snowflake, or Cassandra.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure‑as‑code tooling such as Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems design and large‑scale system trade‑offs.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (Go preferred, but not required).
• Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, cloud storage, and performance/scaling behaviour.
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high‑quality post‑incident reviews.
• Clear communicator who can collaborate across teams and work autonomously.
• Curious, pragmatic, action‑oriented, and kind.

Compensation & Rewards:

In the United Kingdom, the Base compensation range for this role is GBP 91,755 - GBP 110,106. 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. All roles include Restricted Stock Units, giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs’ success.

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. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.

Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.