Staff Software Engineer (Platform, SysEng)

Join Grafana Labs as a Staff Software Engineer in the Platform SysEng squad. You'll work on improving the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our platform as we scale to handle hundreds of millions of metrics per second. Enjoy a fully remote work environment, generous vacation and healthcare benefits, and a focus on professional development.

• Conception, development, and deployment of high-performance, reliable systems that process and store large volumes of data.
• Collaboration with cross-functional teams to improve the maturity and scalability of the platform, focusing on reducing new region build timelines.
• Ownership of the full life cycle of code, from writing design documents to integration testing, ensuring high-quality deliverables.
• Latform roles at Grafana Labs have an eye for engineers with a passion for performance and reliability, and who enjoy taking projects from conception to production
• 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 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
• 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 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
• 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
• 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
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
• 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
• You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, “OSS is in our DNA”
• Terraform and/or Crossplane experience. We have mixed usage - each has its strengths
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter
• Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet