Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is focused on providing a flexible and scalable observability platform. They are seeking a Staff Software Engineer for their Platform SysEng squad to enhance the performance and reliability of their platform while managing infrastructure for various engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- We are hiring for the Platform SysEng squad
- This is an accelerated, cross-cutting squad that is focused on the maturity and scalability of the platform
- Currently, SysEng is working across engineering with a goal of reducing new region build timelines to meet customer demands
- We’re part of a Platform Engineering group that manages infrastructure for the teams that are building some of the most cherished tools - Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope to name a few
- 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 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
- 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 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
- 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
- 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)
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems
- Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
- 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
- Reliability and performance ownership
- Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
- 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
- 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
- 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
Skills
- Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
- 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
- Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
- 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
- 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
- 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
- You've worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, 'OSS is in our DNA'
- Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter
- Terraform and/or Crossplane experience. We have mixed usage - each has its strengths
- Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus (if applicable)
- Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.**
- Company-funded usage budget for AI coding assistants
- Access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro)
Company Overview
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