Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). 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 would be interested in applicants from Canadian time zones only at this time. Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services The Opportunity: The Managed Services team is a newly formed squad within the Databases department. It owns and operates shared, production-critical infrastructure that powers Grafana Cloud's next-generation database products (Mimir, Loki, and Tempo). Today, this includes operating 100+ WarpStream clusters across multiple cloud providers and regions, with continued growth anticipated for the future. WarpStream acts as the streaming backbone for ingestion and read/write decoupling across databases. It sits directly on the hot path for metrics, logs, and traces, handling high-throughput, multi-consumer workloads at massive scale. In addition to streaming infrastructure, the team works closely with high-volume analytical and storage systems that power query-heavy and aggregation-heavy workloads, where latency, compression behavior, storage layout, and scaling characteristics matter deeply. What You'll Be Doing: As a Staff Engineer on Managed Services, you will operate at both the system and team level. You will help shape how we run and evolve shared database infrastructure while remaining deeply hands-on in production. This involves: • 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. At the Staff level, your scope includes advanced systems ownership and informal technical leadership: • 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 • As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must. Of course, there is an on-call component to this role and one that we take seriously. As a company, we hire globally (remote-first) to ensure our on-call remains healthy and aligned to approximately 12 daylight hours per day. You will work closely with counterparts in other regions to provide balanced coverage and shared ownership. This role blends deep distributed systems work with the opportunity to influence how the team approaches reliability, scaling, and operational excellence. We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your da