Staff Software Engineer (Databases SRE)

• 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption

• Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking and cloud storage
• 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
• 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
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time building and owning distributed systems in production
• Staff-level technical leadership: driving cross-team projects, setting technical direction and making the engineers around you better
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing SLOs
• 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!)
• 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
• 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
• Deep understanding of distributed systems: performance, scaling and failure modes. You can reason about how a system will break before it does
• 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.1