Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. The Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng will focus on improving performance and reliability of Grafana Cloud's observability platform while working with a team that manages infrastructure and builds tools for engineers.
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
- 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.
- You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).
- All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success.
- Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.
- 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.
- Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
- Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
- Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- 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 Overview
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