Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | UK | Remote

📋 Job Overview

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.

🏢 About 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.

🎯 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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• 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

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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!)

⭐ Desirable Experience

In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is £103,958 - £124,750. 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.

🎁 Benefits

In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is £103,958 - £124,750. 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.

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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

We’re looking for candidates from the UK, Sweden, Spain or Germany.