Senior Software Engineer - Databases, SRE | USA | Remote

About this role

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 would be interested in applicants based in US timezones at this time.

Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, SRE

The Opportunity:

We are looking for a Senior 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.

What You’ll Be Doing:

The SRE team is embedded within the Mimir and Loki squads and focuses on ensuring that Grafana Cloud’s database products deliver exceptional reliability for our highest-SLA customers. We seek a senior engineer operating at the intersection of customer needs, production systems, and product engineering. 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

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.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

What Makes You a Great Fit:

• 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-tolerant design patterns ensuring that we are considering reliability at all stages of the service lifecycle.

• Collaborating with our Engineering Leaders to help define and influence product strategy, roadmaps and technical designs

• Participate in PR review and collaborating with other engineers on their Design Docs

• Teach others about Site Reliability Engineering and communicate best practices to be applied early in development of new features and functionality

• Participate in Incident Response when applicable, including investigation through to resolution, PIR, and communication with customers via Bridge calls where necessary

Requirements:

• 6+ years engineering experience, 3+ 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.).

• 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-morte

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