Staff Software Engineer (Platform, SysEng)

Role overview

Staff Software Engineer for the Platform SysEng squad at Grafana Labs.

You’ll build and operate the Internal Engineering Platform, with a focus on performance, reliability, and scalability. The team delivers tools and systems that application engineers rely on across the full development and deployment lifecycle.

Responsibilities

• Conceive, develop, and deploy tools and systems for application engineers
• Collaborate cross-functionally to improve the platform’s maturity and scalability
• Own reliability and performance end-to-end, including:
  • Defining SLOs/SLIs
  • Capacity planning
  • Performance tuning
• Lead work across the full lifecycle: writing design docs, incorporating developer feedback, and ensuring integration testing
• Provide technical leadership and impact in large distributed systems spanning multiple teams
• Drive outcomes through influence without authority in a remote-first setting

Requirements

• Strong distributed systems experience and comfort working in a remote-first, highly distributed environment
• Demonstrable system design skills and deep understanding of tradeoffs (e.g., latency, consistency, availability, scaling, cost)
• Proven experience shipping and operating complex distributed systems with clear technical leadership
• Reliability/performance ownership: SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, tuning, and reliability delivery
• Excellent coding and design skills; comfort leading designs and writing clear, maintainable, well-tested code
• Practical experience with operating code in both operator and developer contexts
• Strong written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to have

• Experience with AI-assisted development and integrating AI-powered tools into workflows
• Cloud-native platform experience: microservices, containers, Kubernetes, IaC, and operational practices
• Open source or community-based project experience (Grafana Labs emphasizes OSS)
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and Karpenter
• Experience with Terraform and/or Crossplane
• Experience with Tanka and/or Jsonnet

Team tech focus

The Platform team primarily works with Go, Python, and Shell.