Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | Germany | Remote

Remote; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

30 days annual leave

Open source culture

Career growth

Job summary

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - SRE to help optimize reliability for Grafana Cloud databases (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope) offered as a SaaS across AWS, GCP, and Azure. You will own production reliability for high-SLA customer environments and partner with product engineering squads.

We value strong Kubernetes and IaC experience, multi-tenant production systems, and leadership. You’ll design SLOs, automate toil, and lead incident response with post-incident reviews, while

Qualifications

• 8+ years engineering experience, 4+ in SRE/CRE/production engineering.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure; familiarity with IaC tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet).
• Experience operating multi-tenant systems in production.
• Experience designing and implementing SLOs.
• Strong leadership and mentoring capabilities.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, Java, or similar languages.

Responsibilities

• Own production reliability for high-SLA and complex customer environments.
• Design and implement automation to scale reliability practices.
• Proactively reduce SLO burn and prevent incidents.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Contribute to design docs and code reviews.
• Mentor engineers and influence product/engineering roadmaps.
• Improve alerting and observability; collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Skills

SRE/production engineering

Kubernetes

IaC tooling

Leadership

Multi-tenant systems

SLO design

Go

Python

Java

Linux

Networking basics

Incident response

Customer reliability engineering

Automation

Performance & scaling

Tools

Helm

Terraform

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 frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

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 burn for those SLOs, which can be self-directed or as the result of learnings from incidents, and may include improvements to monitoring, automation, increasing self-healing, auto-scaling, etc.

• Improve observability of customers within their environments

• Designing and implementing solutions to ensure reliability and scalability of our environments can meet rapidly increasing demands

• 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 to be applied early in development of new features and functionality

• Participate in Incident Response when applicable, including investigation through to resolution, PIR, and communication with customers via Bridge calls where necessary

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is €109,709 - €131,651. 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.

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

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.

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