Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we're 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. 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-tole