Senior Software Engineer - Databases, SRE | USA | Remote

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer - SRE to enhance the reliability of their Grafana Cloud databases. The role involves partnering with product engineering teams, owning the production reliability for complex customer environments, and implementing automation to ensure high service levels.

Responsibilities:

• Partner closely with product engineering squads (embedded model)
• Own production reliability for high-SLA and complex customer environments
• Design and implement automation to scale our reliability practices
• Ensuring our customers meet our SLO targets
• Define and evolve per-tenant SLOs and reliability models
• Proactively reduce SLO burn to prevent repeat incidents
• Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
• Lead customer-impacting incident response and post-incident reviews
• Contribute to design docs and code reviews
• Influence feature design to ensure production scalability and operability
• Build automation to eliminate toil where needed
• Improve alert quality and reduce noisy escalations
• Regular 1:1s to with your manager and colleagues
• Reviewing and creating SLOs, proactively investigating ways in which we can further reduce budget burn for those SLOs, which can be self-directed or as the result of learnings from incidents, and may include improvements to monitoring, automation, increasing self-healing, auto-scaling, etc
• Improve observability of customers within their environments
• Designing and implementing solutions to ensure reliability and scalability of our environments can meet rapidly increasing demands
• Develop fault-tolerant design patterns ensuring that we are considering reliability at all stages of the service lifecycle
• Collaborating with our Engineering Leaders to help define and influence product strategy, roadmaps and technical designs
• Participate in PR review and collaborating with other engineers on their Design Docs
• Teach others about Site Reliability Engineering and communicate best practices to be applied early in development of new features and functionality
• Participate in Incident Response when applicable, including investigation through to resolution, PIR, and communication with customers via Bridge calls where necessary

Requirements:

• 6+ years engineering experience, 3+ in SRE/CRE/production engineering. Strong preference for those with formal customer reliability engineering experience
• Strong Kubernetes experience in AWS, GCP, or Azure, and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Helm, Terraform, Jsonnet, etc.)
• Experience operating multi-tenant systems in production
• Strong experience designing and implementing SLOs
• Experience with one or more programming languages (e.g. Go, Python, Java, etc)
• Experience with Linux operating systems internals, and some knowledge of networking, cloud storage, and scaling
• Excellent problem-solving and troubleshooting skills
• Experience with calmly and actively participating in blame-free Incident Response, following up on actions, and writing high quality PIRs (Post Incident Reviews, a.k.a. post-mortem documents)
• Ability to reason about performance, scaling, and failure modes
• Comfortable working within an engineering team where individuals are encouraged to have a strong sense of autonomy and self-direction
• Ability to partner deeply with product engineering teams
• We highly value those who are intellectually curious, who default to transparency, possess a high bias towards action, and who are also kind (this is important!)