Staff Software Engineer – Grafana Databases, Managed Services

Grafana Labs

Staff Software Engineer focusing on high-throughput streaming database infrastructure at Grafana Labs. Leading complex technical initiatives and mentoring engineers in a remote-first environment.

Posted 4/13/2026full-timeRemote • 🇬🇧 United KingdomLead💰 £103,958 - £124,750 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSAzureCassandraCloudDistributed SystemsGoGoogle Cloud PlatformKafkaKubernetesLinuxPostgresTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Operating and evolving 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure
Diagnosing and eliminating cross-layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.)
Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale
Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics
Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance
Working directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade-offs, etc.
Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others.
Help define and evolve the technical direction for operating WarpStream and adjacent shared database systems at scale
Lead complex initiatives such as migrations, rollout improvements, and reliability investments
Establish best practices around SLOs, scaling limits, failure isolation, and change safety
Investigate and drive resolution of multi-layer incidents spanning storage, compute, networking, and control-plane dependencies
Identify systemic risks across 100+ clusters and contribute architectural improvements that reduce recurring issues
Improve systems toil and operational ergonomics with automation
Partner with database and platform teams to align on strategy and long-term scalability
Mentor and support engineers as the team matures.

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
Experience with high-throughput streaming systems, analytical or storage backends, or large-scale database infrastructure. Examples of these include Kafka, Redpanda, WarpStream, Postgres, ClickHouse, Snowflake, or Cassandra.
Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.).
Experience leading or driving complex technical efforts, even without formal management responsibilities
Ability to influence technical direction and align teams around reliability improvements
Strong understanding of distributed systems failure modes in multi-cloud environments.
Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented language (Go preferred, but not required).
Working knowledge of Linux internals, networking, cloud storage, and performance/scaling behavior.
Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high-quality post-incident reviews.
Clear communicator who can collaborate across teams and work autonomously.
Intellectually curious, transparent, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)

Benefits

Comp & perks

Equity
Bonus (if applicable)
30 days annual leave
Remote work options
Professional development opportunities

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

SREplatform engineeringproduction engineeringinfrastructure engineeringdistributed systemshigh-throughput streaming systemsdatabase infrastructureKubernetesinfrastructure-as-codesystems-oriented programming

Soft Skills

influence technical directioncollaborationautonomymentorshipclear communicationintellectual curiositytransparencyaction-orientedkindness