Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services Remote

Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services This is a remote opportunity and we would be interested in applicants living in UK time zones only at this time.

The Opportunity:

The Managed Services team is a newly formed squad within the Databases department. It owns and operates shared, production‑critical infrastructure that powers Grafana Cloud’s next‑generation database products (Mimir, Loki, and Tempo). Today, this includes operating 100+ Warp Stream clusters across multiple cloud providers and regions, with continued growth anticipated for the future. Warp Stream acts as the streaming backbone for ingestion and read/write decoupling across databases.

It sits directly on the hot path for metrics, logs, and traces, handling high‑throughput, multi‑consumer workloads at massive scale.

In addition to streaming infrastructure, the team works closely with high‑volume analytical and storage systems that power query‑heavy and aggregation‑heavy workloads, where latency, compression behaviour, storage layout, and scaling characteristics matter deeply.

• 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 behaviour, 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 Warp Stream Labs and others.
• Providing guidance and regular updates via video calls, requiring an independent attitude and strong communication skills.

• 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 neighbours, 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)

• 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 include Kafka, Redpanda, Warp Stream, Postgres, Click House, Snowflake, or Cassandra.
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure‑as‑code tooling such as 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 behaviour.
• Experience participating in blameless incident response and writing high‑quality post‑incident reviews.
• Clear…