Director of Engineering, Loki Databases | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs

9h•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company with over 20 million users of its visualization tool, Grafana. They assist more than 3,000 companies, including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay, in managing their observability strategies using the Grafana LGTM Stack (Grafana Mimir for metrics, Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Tempo for traces, and Grafana Pyroscope for profiles). This stack can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack. The company is rapidly scaling while maintaining its open-source legacy, global collaborative culture, and passion for meaningful work, fostering an innovation-driven environment built on transparency, autonomy, and trust. The Director of Engineering, Loki Databases, will join the Databases department, which is responsible for owning and operating telemetry databases (Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope) as a Cloud service for Grafana Cloud. The Logs group, a part of the Databases department, is tasked with providing the most scalable, efficient, and user-friendly logs database, overseeing the development of Grafana Cloud Logs, Loki OSS, and Grafana Enterprise Logs. Loki is a Cloud-native database, developed in Go, delivered as microservices, and stores data in object storage to enable logs observability at scale. Grafana Labs embraces diversity and different experiences to build diverse teams.

Requirements

A strong Director level engineering people manager with an entrepreneurial vision.
A motivated self-starter with a strong bias toward action and ownership, able to navigate ambiguity and drive work forward in complex problem spaces.
Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety.
Experienced in guiding and supporting other engineers, leading initiatives or small teams, and collaborating effectively to drive projects to successful outcomes.
Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and real-world impact.
Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
Comfort with AI-assisted tooling. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.

Responsibilities

Leading a team of 20+ engineers and growing them over time, including managing managers, developing a team of engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations.
Collaborate closely with product, design and engineering leadership to define goals that move the Logs group forward and align with broader business objectives.
Drive the product vision from listening to customer feedback and anticipating market trends.
Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from early ideation through planning, execution and post‑launch guiding the team to deliver high‑quality outcomes consistently.
Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and a culture of continuous improvement.
Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.