Grafana Labs
Senior Software Engineer- Grafana Databases, Managed Services| Germany| Remote
Remote R&D : Databases role with clear candidate location fit.
PostedRecently added
Eligible countries4 accepted countries
Seniority signalSenior
Work settingRemote
Accepted candidate locations
GermanyIrelandSpainUnited Kingdom
Role overview
Senior Software Engineer- Grafana Databases, Managed Services| Germany| Remote
Requirements and responsibilities
Readable role content extracted into sections for faster review.
The Opportunity:
- 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.
- As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.
The Opportunity:
- Regular 1:1s with your manager and close collaboration with teammates across regions
- Reviewing and defining SLOs for shared database infrastructure, proactively reducing error budgets through improvements to monitoring, automation, scaling strategies, and system design
- Improving the diagnosability of core streaming and database systems in production, where possible.
- Implementing solutions that ensure reliability, scalability, and performance of high-throughput, multi-cloud infrastructure
- Developing fault-tolerant patterns that account for distributed system realities such as storage latency, partition imbalance, noisy neighbors, and control-plane dependencies
- Planning and executing safe upgrades and rollouts across dozens of production clusters
- Collaborating with database and platform engineering leaders to influence architecture, roadmap priorities, and long-term strategy
- Participating in PR review and contributing to design documents, automation, tooling, and code improvements that reduce operational risk
- Sharing best practices and distributed systems knowledge with partner teams
- Participating in incident response, from investigation through resolution and post-incident reviews (PIR)
The Opportunity:
- 6+ years of engineering experience, including meaningful time in SRE, platform engineering, production engineering, infrastructure engineering, or distributed systems roles.
- Experience operating distributed systems in production (e.g., streaming systems, analytical databases, large-scale storage backends). 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.).
- Solid understanding of distributed systems design and large-scale system trade-offs.
- Proficiency in at least one programming 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.
- Curious, pragmatic, action-oriented, and kind (this is important!)
Details
- 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.
- 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.
Similar roles
Keep a backup shortlist.
Stack
Use these tags to compare similar remote roles.
Location eligibility
Candidates should apply only when their profile country is listed here.
Your profileCountry not setSign in to check your country against this role.
Hiring flow
WithMira shows the role, then sends candidates to the company application.
1Check role fit, stack, and location eligibility in WithMira.
2Open the company application page from the tracked apply link.
3Save the role or subscribe for similar opportunities before leaving.