Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. The Staff Software Engineer - Platform, SysEng will focus on improving performance and reliability of Grafana Cloud's observability platform while working with a team that manages infrastructure and builds tools for engineers.

Responsibilities:

• We are hiring for the Platform SysEng squad
• This is an accelerated, cross-cutting squad that is focused on the maturity and scalability of the platform
• Currently, SysEng is working across engineering with a goal of reducing new region build timelines to meet customer demands
• We’re part of a Platform Engineering group that manages infrastructure for the teams that are building some of the most cherished tools - Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope to name a few
• You enjoy working with engineers, as well as with the management structures that are there to support you and enable you and your team to do your very best
• You are comfortable working in a remote-first company; communication is key
• For us, working together means being collaborative, friendly, kind, and respectful
• We operate by consensus, you can contribute to a discussion but then commit to the team decision
• As such, being such a highly distributed company, means we would love someone who is keen on working with distributed systems, too
• You are eager to learn and grow
• There is a lot of room for growth and development, and the team has quite a lot of knowledge to share for those who are wanting to learn
• You approach development holistically
• The team owns the full life cycle of our code; from writing design docs, to looking at developer feedback, and integration testing
• We appreciate engineers who enjoy looking at the big picture, and also notice the details of the brush strokes
• The Platform team mainly works with Go, Python, and Shell
• You have experience with operating your code
• Since a lot of operators and developers use our software, having some grounding in both of these spaces really helps us with building better platforms for our users
• 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)
• Proven delivery of large distributed systems
• Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Demonstrable experience in system design
• Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience
• Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
• Reliability and performance ownership
• Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
• Excellent coding and design skills
• You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
• Comfort with AI-assisted development
• We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow
• Influence without authority
• Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
• Strong communicator
• Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders

Requirements:

• Proven delivery of large distributed systems. Experience shipping and operating complex systems that span multiple teams, with clear evidence of technical leadership and impact
• Demonstrable experience in system design. Deep understanding of tradeoffs around latency, consistency, availability, scaling and cost
• Hands-on cloud and platform experience. Solid experience with cloud-native architectures (microservices, containers/Kubernetes, IaC) and the operational practices that keep them healthy
• Reliability and performance ownership. Comfortable defining SLOs/SLIs, doing capacity planning, tuning performance, and driving reliability work end-to-end
• Excellent coding and design skills. You write clear, maintainable, well-tested code and can lead technical designs — we use Go, but Python/C/C++/Rust or similar translate well
• Comfort with AI-assisted development. We embrace AI and agentic development so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered developer tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team's workflow
• Influence without authority. Ability to align cross-functional stakeholders, set priorities and drive outcomes in a remote-first environment
• Strong communicator. Clear written and verbal communication that works across engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• You've worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, 'OSS is in our DNA'
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter
• Terraform and/or Crossplane experience. We have mixed usage - each has its strengths
• Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet