Engineering Manager, Identity and Access | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs

7h • Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).
We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants based in the Unites States (excluding PST timezones) at this time.
Engineering Manager - Identity and Access
The Opportunity:
Every day, millions of users rely on Grafana to monitor the health and performance of critical systems, from software applications to industrial environments and spacecraft. The Identity and Access team builds Grafana’s sign-in and permission systems. Our goal is simple: make sign-in smooth for end users, and make access controls clear, secure, and predictable for administrators.
The IAM team is responsible for authentication and authorization across Grafana, working across both our open-source and proprietary codebases. Our scope spans SAML, LDAP, OAuth/OIDC, JWT, and role-based access control (RBAC). Some integrations go deep, down to protocol details (for example, reading the SAML spec).
The IAM team is redesigning Grafana’s edge authentication and multitenant storage for identity resources, which is a rare chance to work on modern identity infrastructure at scale. Our code runs in critical request paths, so design decisions directly affect performance, reliability, and security across Grafana Labs’ products.
The team is evenly distributed across EMEA and NASA.

Requirements

• You take initiative, follow through, and can move work forward in a complex, security-sensitive problem space, even when not everything is fully defined.
• Experienced in people management: conducting meaningful 1:1s, delivering candid feedback, supporting career growth, and navigating performance conversations.
• You trust your reports to own execution. Your focus is setting direction, aligning on outcomes, and spotting risks early, not task-level oversight. You judge performance by impact and delivery, not process for its own sake.
• Transparent and direct by default. You share organizational context with your reports and treat them as partners. You advocate clearly for your reports when they are not in the room.
• You back your reports' decisions publicly, and escalate when needed to resolve cross-team conflicts. When priorities collide, you make the call or create a clear path to one; you do not leave your team to absorb the ambiguity alone.
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear and empathetic communication to build trust and a supportive team environment.
• A strong software engineering background, ideally including work in backend systems using Go, sufficient to engage credibly in technical design discussions and challenge engineers toward strong decisions.
• Familiarity with authentication and authorization concepts: OAuth 2.0, SAML, RBAC, OIDC, JWT…. You do not need to be a security expert, but you should be comfortable reasoning about identity and access problems.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles: scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Demonstrated ability to manage delivery across multiple concurrent projects, align stakeholders with competing priorities, and communicate risks and timelines clearly.
• Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding technical decisions in real-world user and admin impact.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling. We expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered tools, ideally with practical experience integrating them into a team's workflow.
• Strong mentoring and leadership skills

Nice To Haves

• Experience working in security-critical environments
• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)

Responsibilities

• Manage and grow a team of distributed engineers, conducting regular 1:1s and providing consistent feedback to support each person's performance and career development.
• Partner with product management and engineering leadership to shape the IAM roadmap, balancing security requirements, platform needs, and customer impact.
• Guide the team through the full project lifecycle: from early design and scoping through delivery and post-launch iteration, ensuring high-quality and timely outcomes.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional partners including security, platform, cloud infrastructure, and the broader Grafana engineering organization to drive initiatives that span team boundaries.
• Foster a team culture grounded in security-first thinking, technical rigor, and a respectful environment where people can do their best work.
• Contribute to technical discussions, helping the team make strong architectural decisions on authentication flows and multi-tenant design.
• As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is entirely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude, good communication skills, and transparency are a must.

Benefits

• All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.
• Balance is Key - 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed