Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Join the Adaptive Telemetry group within the Databases department at Grafana Labs. This team focuses on optimizing telemetry data within Grafana Cloud, ensuring only valuable information is retained. You will contribute to solutions like Adaptive Metrics and Adaptive Logs, helping customers manage and reduce their data storage costs.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define and guide the technical strategy and roadmap for the team.
• Lead the complete lifecycle of large, cross-functional projects, from planning to operation.
• Be responsible for the architecture, reliability, performance, and cost of critical systems.
• Set service level objectives (SLOs) and indicators (SLIs), and manage incident response.
• Improve observability, automation, and operational readiness for systems.
• Coordinate with product, design, and other teams to align priorities and resolve blockers.
• Mentor and develop engineers, conducting design reviews and elevating engineering standards.
• Represent the engineering team internally and externally, communicating technical strategy.

Requirements

• Demonstrated ability to deliver and operate large distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of system design principles, including tradeoffs in latency, consistency, and scalability.
• Practical experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code).
• Ownership of reliability and performance, including defining SLOs/SLIs and capacity planning.
• Excellent coding and design skills; experience with Go, Python, C, C++, or Rust is suitable.
• Comfort with and curiosity for AI-assisted development tools and integrating them into workflows.
• Familiarity with streaming/messaging systems (e.g., Kafka) and observability tools (Prometheus/Grafana).
• Ability to influence stakeholders and drive outcomes in a remote setting.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Practical notes

This is a 100% remote position within USA time zones. Compensation includes equity and a potential bonus, along with other benefits. Grafana Labs offers 30 days of annual leave, with 3 days reserved for company-wide shutdowns. New hires participate in an in-person onboarding experience. The company supports AI coding assistants with a funded usage budget.