Grafana Labs
Senior Software Engineer - k6 Core | United Kingdom | Remote
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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.
Senior Software Engineer - k6 Core
The Opportunity
At k6, we build reliability and performance testing tools for developers and QA engineers.
Grafana k6 is an open-source project focused on making performance testing practical, approachable, and useful in real-world engineering workflows. We care deeply about developer experience, correctness, and scalability. k6 is part of the Grafana ecosystem and is used by engineers to test and understand systems under real load.
What You’ll Be Doing
- You will join a team of engineers responsible for building and maintaining k6, a performance testing tool written in Go.
- The team also maintains the open-source project, which means working directly on the product, the codebase, and with the community using it.
- In this role, you will work on features and improvements across the k6 codebase, from initial idea through implementation and delivery.
- Much of the work involves problems that are not fully specified up front and require understanding the context, evaluating trade-offs, and choosing a reasonable technical approach.
- You will work with a high degree of independence while collaborating closely with other engineers on design, implementation, and code reviews.
- You are expected to deliver production-quality code, maintain existing functionality, and help keep the system reliable and maintainable over time.
- Some work may involve the k6 cloud offering, which builds on top of k6 to run distributed tests across data centers worldwide. This includes Go services that support distributed execution and require careful attention to performance, correctness, and failure modes.
- Because the team is small, your work will have a direct and visible impact on the product and its users.
- You will work alongside experienced engineers in an environment that values clarity, pragmatism, and sound engineering judgment.
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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 with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
What Makes You a Great Fit
- We start with problems, not prescriptions. Engineers are expected to understand the constraints, propose a pragmatic design, and carry the work through to delivery.
- We move deliberately and release on a regular cadence of roughly every six weeks. Between releases, we focus on small, safe, incremental changes.
- Work is asynchronous by default, with decisions captured in pull requests and short design notes.
- Meetings are used for alignment rather than status updates.
- Code reviews focus on correctness, long-term maintainability, and user impact.
- When trade-offs are required, we aim to make them explicit and reversible.
- The team owns the product end to end, including architecture, releases, user-facing behavior, and the health of the open-source project.
We’re looking for an experienced engineer with strong programming skills and a track record of working on non-trivial systems.
You Should Have
- Strong experience building production software in Go, or another language with good support for concurrency and parallelism.
- Experience working on larger or long-lived codebases.
- The ability to work independently on scoped problems and deliver them to completion.
- Clear technical communication skills, especially in code reviews and design discussions.
- A good understanding of internet protocols such as HTTP, gRPC, and WebSockets, with some familiarity with lower-level networking concepts.
- Experience with modern development practices, including testing, code review, and iterative development.
Bonus Points For
- You do not need experience with everything listed below. These are areas where familiarity is useful for the role, and the more you bring, the easier the ramp-up will be:
- Contributing to or maintaining open-source projects.
- Prior experience using k6 in production, or contributing to the k6 project or ecosystem.
- Performance, reliability, or network testing and optimization.
- Distributed systems or cloud-based services.
- JavaScript and/or TypeScript.
- Backend systems for web or mobile applications.
- Tools and platforms such as Docker, AWS, microservices architectures, and observability tools like Grafana or APM systems.
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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. 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
Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation 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.
For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy.
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