Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | UK | Remote

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 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).

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.

What Makes You a Great Fit

Regular 1:1s with your manager and close collaboration with teammates across regions Reviewing and defining SLOs for shared database infrastructure, proactively reducing error budgets through improvements to monitoring, automation, scaling strategies, and system design Improving the diagnosability of core streaming and database systems in production, where possible. Implementing solutions that ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure Developing fault-tolerant patterns that account for distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbors, and control-plane dependencies Planning and executing safe upgrades and rollouts across dozens of production clusters Collaborating with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture, roadmap priorities, and long-term strategy Participating in PR review and contributing to design documents, automation, tooling, and code improvements that reduce operational risk Sharing best practices and distributed systems knowledge with partner teams Participating in incident response, from investigation through resolution and post-incident reviews (PIR)

Requirements

6+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles. Experience operating distributed systems in production (e.g., streaming systems, analytical databases, large-scale storage backends). 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.). Solid understanding of distributed systems design and large-scale system trade-offs. Proficiency in at least one programming 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. Curious, pragmatic, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)

Compensation & Rewards

In the United Kingdom, the Base compensation range for this role is GBP 91,755 - GBP 110,106. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.

All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

Compensation ranges are country specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive At Grafana Labs

100% Remote, Global Culture - As a remote-only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose. Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment. Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates. Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things. Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work. Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics. Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career. Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human. Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do. In-Person onboarding - We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it. Balance is Key - We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer: We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organization and we’re working hard to make sure that’s the foundation of our organization as we grow.

Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

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