Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Metal | Germany | Remote

Grafana Labs; Deutschland; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 151,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSUs

30 days annual leave

Remote work

Job summary

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. We are building a new Platform “Metal” squad to provision storage, networking and Kubernetes clusters in on‑prem environments, starting with our own hardware.

You will lead engineers across time zones, shaping ownership, metrics and outcomes to deliver high‑quality results. Join a bold, innovative team that values autonomy, transparency, and customer impact.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience building and managing on-prem/bare metal environments.
• Strong leadership and people-management skills with a bias toward action.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity and drive work forward in complex problem spaces.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration and communication across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Hire, manage, and develop a team of engineers, providing regular feedback and career growth conversations.
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering leadership to define squad goals.
• Provide guidance through the project lifecycle from ideation to post-launch.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment that encourages learning and experimentation.
• Work across team boundaries and partner with other functions to solve customer problems.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

Remote collaboration

Strategic planning

Mentoring

Tools

Kubernetes

Ceph

Job description

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.

Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Metal

About our Platform:

Grafana Cloud moves millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second from our customers' environments into a highly available, low-latency stack that processes and stores this data, and serves them to dashboards and alerting tools. We aim to grow this to hundreds of millions per second, and it's critical that as we grow, we improve our performance, increase our reliability, and, of course, do it efficiently and effectively.

The Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) delivered by the Platform group provides application engineers with the tools, systems and Kubernetes clusters they need to build, deploy and run their workloads.

We are hiring a manager as part of the creation of a new Platform “Metal” squad. This squad will be responsible for building and provisioning resources including storage, networking and Kubernetes clusters in new environments, starting with our own physical hardware. They will provide a Kubernetes control plane and underlying resources, outside public Cloud, to the rest of Engineering.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Hire, manage, and develop a team of engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to define goals that move the squad forward and align with broader business objectives.
• Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from early ideation through planning, execution, and post‑launch, guiding the team to deliver high‑quality results consistently.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment, and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.

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).

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• Demonstrable experience building and managing on‑prem/bare metal environments
• A motivated self‑starter with a strong bias toward action and ownership, able to navigate ambiguity and drive work forward in complex problem spaces.
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety.
• Experienced in guiding and supporting other engineers, leading initiatives or small teams, and collaborating effectively to drive projects to successful outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high‑quality results.
• Deeply customer‑focused, consistently grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and real‑world impact.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, production‑readiness, and observability.
• Comfort with AI‑assisted tooling. We embrace AI and agentic development, so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI‑powered tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.

Bonus Points For:

• Running Kubernetes and/or Ceph in production environments
• Experience dealing with colo facilities and associated vendors
• You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community‑based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, “OSS is in our DNA”

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 120,000 - EUR 151,000. 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.

*Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

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 we 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. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

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.

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.

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