Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE

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. 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: 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 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