Staff Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | UK | Remote

Requirements:

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
• Experience with high-throughput streaming systems, analytical or storage backends, or large-scale database infrastructure. 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.).
• Experience leading or driving complex technical efforts, even without formal management responsibilities.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams around reliability improvements.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems failure modes in multi-cloud environments.
• Proficiency in at least one systems-oriented 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.
• Intellectually curious, transparent, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!).

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

Perks and Benefits:

• Remote opportunity in UK time zones only
• Base compensation range of GBP 103,958 - GBP 124,750 (may vary based on level, experience, and skillset)
• Equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits
• Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) to give ownership in Grafana Labs' success