Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs

3d•$174,986 - $209,983•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer for their Platform SysEng squad. This role is focused on the maturity and scalability of the internal engineering platform, which provides application engineers with the tools, systems, and Kubernetes clusters needed to build, deploy, and run their workloads. The team is working to reduce new region build timelines to meet customer demands and manages infrastructure for teams building tools like Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. The role involves working with distributed systems, taking projects from conception to production, and participating in on-call rotations. Grafana Labs is a 100% remote company with a global, collaborative culture that values transparency, autonomy, and trust.

Requirements

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, with a deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling, and cost.
Hands-on cloud and platform experience, with solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and operational practices.
Reliability and performance ownership.
Excellent coding and design skills; clear, maintainable, well-tested code.
Comfort with AI-assisted development; curiosity and comfort using AI-powered developer tools, ideally with practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.
Influence without authority.
Strong communicator; clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
Experience with Go, Python, or similar languages (C/C++/Rust translate well).
Comfort working in a remote-first company; strong communication skills are key.
Collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful approach to teamwork.
Ability to contribute to discussions and commit to team decisions.
Eagerness to learn and grow.

Nice To Haves

Experience working in or on open source, or other community-based projects.
Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter.
Terraform and/or Crossplane experience.
Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet.

Responsibilities

Focus on the maturity and scalability of the internal engineering platform.
Reduce new region build timelines to meet customer demands.
Manage infrastructure for teams building core Grafana Labs products.
Take projects from conception to production.
Participate in on-call rotations to ensure system health.
Work with distributed systems.
Contribute to design docs, developer feedback, and integration testing.
Operate your code and build better platforms for users.
Utilize modern AI coding assistants as part of the daily workflow.
Define SLOs/SLIs, do capacity planning, tune performance, and drive reliability work.
Lead technical designs.
Align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities, and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment.