Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. They are seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead their Corporate Engineering team, focusing on optimizing IT operations and driving internal AI strategies.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the team covering a range of existing areas, including corporate systems, employee device lifecycles, helpdesk queues, and internal tooling development
- Handle corporate security initiatives, deploying security and compliance checks in an employee-enabling way (guardrails and paved roads) in their daily workflows
- Help define our wider internal AI rollout, enablement, and security strategy across all teams, not just developers
- Manage the relationships, negotiation, and contracting with core SaaS vendors
- Make all work and costs visible, both internally to the team and enable stakeholder teams to understand their processes and work. Use this visibility to continuously improve processes
- Understand and, where possible, leverage the Grafana product and ecosystem to solve corporate engineering challenges. Open-source what we come up with for the good of other Grafana users
- Act as a leader within the larger Foundations department, including all other platform, business application, and security teams
- Conduct regular 1:1s, coaching, and mentoring to ensure your team members are motivated, happy and engaged. Provide continuous feedback to ensure that they can add value while maintaining high standards
- Participate in team activities. Be a participant in all work queues. Contribute to and review design documents for upcoming projects, ensuring projects are well-defined and ready for development. You will be part of your team’s and department's on-call rotation
Requirements:
- Experience running a software engineering operations team
- Strong engineering background capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenging teams to arrive at strong technical decisions
- Understanding of at least one cloud provider and a working knowledge of k8s
- Deep hands-on experience managing and automating corporate IT systems commonly used by modern tech companies, including the gamut of operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android), SSO (Okta, 1Password), workplace productivity tools (Google Workspace, Office), MDM (Jamf, Intune, FleetDM, Kolide), EDR, DLP, typical corporate SaaS platforms (Salesforce, Zendesk), AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Google, etc), and managing employee laptops and devices
- Approach IT and corporate security with a DevOps mindset, preferring enablement, automation, and guardrails over gates and roadblocks
- Experience providing internal platforms to other teams and seeing IT as a provider of tools, platforms, and automation, rather than a ticket-taking service provider
- Knowledge of the current AI state of the art, and strong ideas on how to leverage effectively and safely across the enterprise
- Deep curiosity about software, security, and the current and future states of technology
- Excellent written and verbal communicator who can articulate complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision-making, and guiding via influence
- Work Eastern-time oriented hours
- A technical background, ideally with programming or software engineering experience, before transitioning into leadership
- Experience with Go, multiple cloud providers, and kubernetes expertise
- Significant experience leveraging and securing AI tooling for all core personas (non-development, code, agentic automation)
- A ready plan for how to secure AI
- Working knowledge of Grafana Labs OSS projects and products, and experience using observability tooling to solve IT or security problems
- Experience working with OSS communities