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

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!).

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).

What You'll Be Doing:

• Operating and evolving 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure.
• Diagnosing and eliminating cross-layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.).
• Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale.
• Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics.
• Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance.
• Working directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade-offs, etc.
• Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents.
• Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others.
• As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Ireland, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 104,000 - EUR 124,800. 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.