Staff Software Engineer (Platform, SysEng)

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Software Engineer in the Platform SysEng squad. You'll work on improving performance, reliability, and scalability of our platform, which processes millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second. Enjoy a fully remote work environment, generous vacation and healthcare benefits, and a focus on professional development.

• Conception, development, and production deployment of projects aimed at improving performance, reliability, and scalability of the platform.
• Collaboration with cross-functional teams to reduce new region build timelines and meet customer demands.
• Ownership of the full life cycle of code, from writing design docs to integration testing, ensuring high-quality deliverables.
• You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key. For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful. We operate by consensus, you can contribute to a discussion but then commit to the team decision
• You have experience with operating your code. Since a lot of operators and developers use our software, having some grounding in both of these spaces really helps us with building better platforms for our users
• You enjoy working with engineers, as well as with the management structures that are there to support you and enable you and your team to do your very best
• You approach development holistically. The team owns the full life cycle of our code; from writing design docs, to looking at developer feedback, and integration testing. We appreciate engineers who enjoy looking at the big picture, and also notice the details of the brush strokes. The Platform team mainly works with Go, Python, and Shell
• As such, being such a highly distributed company, means we would love someone who is keen on working with distributed systems, too
• You are eager to learn and grow. There is a lot of room for growth and development, and the team has quite a lot of knowledge to share for those who are wanting to learn
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow
• Demonstrable experience in system design. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
• Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
• Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
• Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
• You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, “OSS is in our DNA”
• Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet
• 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
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter
• Terraform and/or Crossplane experience. We have mixed usage - each has its strengths