Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | Germany | Remote

Academic Key; Deutschland; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - SRE to enhance reliability for Grafana Cloud databases (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope). This remote role supports customers across AWS, GCP, and Azure and emphasizes automation, SLOs, and incident response.

You will collaborate with product engineering squads and lead on-call for high-SLA environments. You will mentor engineers, shape reliability practices, and advocate for scalable, secure, and maintainable systems while leveraging AI-assisted

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience with focus on reliability.
• 4+ years in SRE/production engineering or equivalent.
• Strong Kubernetes expertise across AWS, GCP or Azure.

Responsibilities

• Lead SRE practices for Grafana Cloud databases and SaaS products.
• Design and implement automation to scale reliability.
• Own production reliability and on-call for high-SLA environments.
• Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models.
• Drive incident response, post-incident reviews and PIRs.

Skills

8+ years engineering experience

4+ years SRE/production engineering

Kubernetes on AWS/GCP/Azure

Infrastructure as Code (Helm,Terraform

Jsonnet

Technical leadership / mentoring

Multi-tenant production systems

Designing/implementing SLOs

Go / Python / Java

Linux networking fundamentals

Incident response / post-incident PIRs

Tools

Terraform

Helm

Jsonnet

Job description

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 (and their agents) 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. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X . 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 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 Ensuring our customers meet our SLO targets Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models Proactively reduce SLO burn to prevent repeat incidents Serving 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 (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 the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. 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, a.k.a. post-mortem documents) 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 We highly value those who are intellectually curious, who default to transparency, possess a high bias towards action, and who are also kind (this is important!) Your day-to-day will include: Regular 1:1s to with your manager and colleagues Reviewing and creating SLOs, proactively investigating ways in which we can further reduce budget bu