Engineering Manager (Platform - Usage)

Role overview

As an Engineering Manager (Platform - Usage) at Grafana Labs, you will lead a distributed engineering team within the Usage squad. You’ll shape the squad’s roadmap and guide delivery across the full project lifecycle, while also contributing to hiring efforts.

Key missions

• Manage and grow a distributed team of engineers through regular 1:1s, candid feedback, and support for performance and career development.
• Partner with Product Management and Engineering leadership to define the Usage squad’s roadmap, strategy, and OKRs, ensuring alignment with company mission and customer impact.
• Guide delivery end-to-end, from early technical design and scoping through delivery and post-launch iteration, ensuring quality and timely outcomes.
• Contribute to hiring/talent acquisition, supporting team growth.

What you’ll be like (profile)

• Transparent and direct; proactively resolves ambiguity and conflicts when priorities collide.
• Outcome-focused leadership that sets direction, aligns on goals, and identifies risks early.
• Strong communicator comfortable with asynchronous collaboration across time zones.
• Initiative-driven in complex, systems-focused domains such as stateful systems, eventual consistency, and reconciliation loops.
• People management experience, including feedback and performance/career conversations.
• Curious about AI-assisted tooling and willing to integrate AI-powered tools into the workflow.

Requirements

• People management: at least 2 years managing software engineering teams; includes regular 1:1s and feedback.
• Engineering background: prior IC experience for at least 3 years, ideally with backend systems experience (e.g., Go) to participate credibly in technical design discussions.
• Delivery management: ability to manage multiple concurrent projects, align stakeholders with competing priorities, and communicate risks/timelines.
• Distributed systems fundamentals: scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Customer focus: ground technical decisions in real-world user and business impact.

Nice-to-have / preferred experience

• Experience with SaaS provisioning, tenancy, regional expansion, plugin rollout, or customer lifecycle systems.
• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source.
• Familiarity with cloud marketplace integrations (AWS/Azure/GCP) and compliance or RBAC-related refactoring.
• Experience with Kubernetes control-plane patterns (operators/reconcilers/desired-state systems).
• Observability tooling experience (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience with usage metering, high-volume billing, and customer-facing cost management (e.g., CMAB).
• Experience implementing automated pricing logic (promotions, discounts, rebilling, usage forgiveness) with strong auditability.