Staff SRE at Grafana Labs - Grow in Observability

Grafana Labs; United States; A distancia; USD 132.000 - 158.000; Jornada completa

Ventajas ofrecidas por este puesto de trabajo

Equity potential

Remote work (global)

Career growth opportunities

30 days annual leave (Grafana Shutdown

Descripción de la vacante

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff SRE to own reliability across Grafana Cloud services (Mimir, Loki, Tempo). You will write production code, build automation, and shape design across multi-cloud Kubernetes environments while on-call for top customers.

The role emphasizes blameless post-mortems, autonomy, and cross-team leadership in a fully remote setting. Ideal candidates have 8+ years in software engineering, strong SRE background, and experience with Kubernetes, Terraform/Helm, and SLO design.

Formación

• Strong background in distributed systems engineering in production.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes across clouds and IaC tooling.
• Experience designing and owning SLOs and reliability practices.
• Contributions to open-source projects.

Responsabilidades

• Build reliability into the product through production code and tooling.
• Create automation and platform tooling to scale reliability.
• Lead technical design and review feature implementations.
• Own and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models.
• Improve observability and alerting to reduce incidents.
• On-call for high-SLA customers and drive post-incident reviews.
• Tackle operational on-call work and recurring issues with fixes.
• Mentor engineers and shape cross-team reliability practices.

Herramientas

Terraform

Helm

Descripción del empleo

Staff SRE at Grafana Labs - Grow in Observability — Remote

Staff-Level Role at a High-Growth, Well-Funded Company

Grafana Labs is backed by Sequoia, Lightspeed, and J.P. Morgan — a Series D+ company that hasn't gone public yet, meaning equity could carry significant upside. The Irish salary band of €117K–€141K is competitive for a Staff SRE/SWE role in Europe, roughly in line with or above market for Dublin and above market for cities like Madrid or Stockholm where cost of living is lower.

Skills This Role Builds

• Deep expertise in distributed observability systems (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Prometheus) — among the most in-demand skills in platform engineering in 2024–2025.
• Multi-cloud Kubernetes operations (AWS, GCP, Azure) with IaC (Terraform, Helm) — highly transferable and well-compensated.
• SLO design and ownership — increasingly required at senior levels across the industry.
• Open-source codebase contributions — builds public profile and market visibility.

The emphasis on blameless post-mortems, transparency, and autonomy are strong green flags for engineers who want to grow without politics. The staff-level scope (cross-team technical direction, mentoring) is a clear path toward principal engineer or engineering leadership roles.

Potential Consideration: The on-call cadence — including weekend shifts every 6–8 weeks and incident bridge calls — means this role has real operational demands. Candidates should weigh this against the strong compensation and high-impact engineering scope.

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 unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives. 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. We are looking for candidates based in the UK, Sweden, Spain, Germany, or Ireland.

About the Role

Grafana Cloud runs Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope as multi-tenant SaaS databases across AWS, GCP, and Azure in regions worldwide. Our highest-SLA customers depend on them to run their businesses. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to keep these systems reliable at scale.

The role combines building and operating. You'll write the software, automation, and product changes that make our databases more reliable — including changes to the Mimir, Loki, and Tempo codebases where reliability calls for it. You'll also be on call for our highest‑SLA customers and handle the operational work that comes with it. You'll bring a production mindset to product engineering and engineering rigor to reliability, and you'll set technical direction across squads.

What You'll Do

• Build reliability into the product. Write production code in our services, tooling, and the Mimir, Loki, and Tempo codebases that makes our databases more resilient, self‑healing, and scalable as demand grows quickly.
• Build automation and platform tooling that removes toil and scales our reliability practices across regions and cloud providers.
• Lead technical design. Author design docs, review others' designs and PRs, and shape feature design so it's scalable and operable from day one.
• Own the SLO framework. Define and evolve per‑tenant SLOs and reliability models. Use SLO burn and incident learnings to find and fix the causes of failure in the systems themselves.
• Improve observability and alerting so we find problems before customers do, and so escalations are actionable rather than noisy.
• Be on call for our highest‑SLA customers. Act as a technical escalation point for complex customer environments. Lead customer‑impacting incident response, including customer bridge calls when needed, and write blameless post‑incident reviews that lead to engineering fixes.
• Handle the operational work that comes from on‑call. This includes investigating customer escalations, following up on incident actions, tuning capacity and configuration, and turning recurring issues into permanent fixes or automation.
• Multiply the team. Mentor engineers, teach reliability practices that teams adopt early in development, and work with engineering leadership on roadmaps and product strategy.
• 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!).

On‑Call Schedule

Weekday on‑call is 12‑hour shifts, Monday to Friday, split between North America and Europe so you cover your local working hours. Weekends are covered by a separate 24‑hour rotation. You'll take a weekend roughly once every six to eight weeks.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time building and owning distributed systems in production.
• Strong production software skills, ideally in at least one object‑oriented language. You write clean, tested code and can make targeted changes in large open‑source codebases you didn't write.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: performance, scaling, and failure modes. You can reason about how a system will break before it does.
• Experience running multi‑tenant systems at scale on Kubernetes in AWS, GCP, or Azure, with infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Terraform, Helm, or Jsonnet.
• Hands‑on experience designing and implementing SLOs.
• Experience being on call for production systems. You troubleshoot calmly and methodically under pressure, and you've taken part in blameless incident response and written high‑quality post‑incident reviews.
• Staff‑level technical leadership: driving cross‑team projects, setting technical direction, and making the engineers around you better.
• Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, and cloud storage.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, Prometheus, or other observability and time‑series databases.
• Open‑source contributions.
• Customer reliability engineering (CRE) or customer‑facing escalation experience.

Compensation

In Ireland, the base compensation range for this role is €117,600 – €141,120. 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.

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.

For information about how your personal data is used once you've applied to a job, check out our privacy policy .

Which countries are eligible for this remote role? Grafana Labs is accepting applications from candidates based in the UK, Sweden, Spain, Germany, or Ireland. Compensation ranges are country-specific, so your recruiter will confirm the pay band for your location. What does the on-call schedule look like for this role? Weekday on-call consists of 12‑hour shifts from Monday to Friday, split between North American and European timezones so you cover your local working hours. Weekend on-call is a separate 24‑hour rotation you'll take roughly once every six to eight weeks. What is the salary range for this Staff Software Engineer role? In Ireland, the base salary range is €117,600 to €141,120. Actual compensation varies by country, experience, and skillset; candidates in other eligible countries will have their local range discussed at the start of the process. Is prior experience with Grafana's open‑source tools (Mimir, Loki, Tempo) required? Experience with Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, or Prometheus is listed as a “nice to have” rather than a hard requirement. The core requirements focus on distributed systems expertise, Kubernetes, SLO design, and on‑call experience. What does career growth look like in this role? Grafana Labs offers defined career growth pathways and a culture of transparency and autonomy. As a staff‑level role, you will set technical direction across squads, mentor engineers, and engage with engineering leadership on roadmaps — positioning you for principal engineer or leadership tracks.

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