Staff Software Engineer - Databases SRE | Germany | Remote

About the role

<div class="content-intro"><p>Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at <u><span><a href="http://grafana.com" target="_blank">grafana.com</a></span></u> and follow us on <u><span><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs/" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a></span></u> and <u><span><a href="https://twitter.com/grafana" target="_blank">X</a></span></u>.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p></div><p>This is a remote opportunity and we are looking for candidates from the UK, Sweden, Spain or Germany.</p> <h3><strong>About the role:</strong></h3> <p>We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer - SRE to help us support our highest value Grafana Cloud customers by increasing the reliability of our Cloud databases that are based on Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. We provide these databases as a SaaS product from AWS, GCP, and Azure across all regions.</p> <p>The SRE team is embedded within the Mimir, Loki, and Tempo squads and focuses on ensuring that Grafana Cloud’s database products deliver exceptional reliability for our highest-SLA customers. In this role, you will:</p> <ul> <li>Partner closely with product engineering squads (embedded model)</li> <li>Own production reliability for high-SLA and complex customer environments</li> <li>Design and implement automation to scale our reliability practices</li> <li>Ensuring our customers meet our SLO targets</li> <li>Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models</li> <li>Proactively reduce SLO burn to prevent repeat incidents</li> <li>Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents</li> <li>Lead customer-impacting incident response and post-incident reviews</li> <li>Contribute to design docs and code reviews</li> <li>Influence feature design to ensure production scalability and operability</li> <li>Build automation to eliminate toil where needed</li> <li>Improve alert quality and reduce noisy escalations</li> </ul> <p>We seek a staff software engineer operating at the intersection of customer needs, production systems, and product engineering.</p> <p>We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).</p> <h3><strong>What we seek:</strong></h3> <ul> <li>8+ years enginee

Skills