Software Engineer - Platform Release

Our Platform pipeline moves millions of data points, log lines, and traces per second from our customers' environments into a highly available, low-latency stack that processes and stores the data, and serves it to dashboards and alerting tools. We aim to grow this to hundreds of millions per second, and it's critical that as we grow, we improve our performance, increase our reliability– and, of course, do it efficiently and effectively. We do this across a few different squads: Capacity, Infrastructure, Networking, and Release.

Platform roles at Grafana Labs have an eye for engineers with a passion for performance and reliability, and who enjoy taking projects from conception to production. We host our services in Kubernetes, and our Platform squad owns and maintains the platform delivering Kubernetes and its required complementary services to all of Engineering; as well as designing, implementing, and maintaining the virtual network infrastructure

Because we deploy production services, we have on-call rotations to ensure the health of the system. Everyone at Grafana Labs tries to incorporate and use our product line up into their day-to-day, so being on call is an important way to understand our system and how people use our products.

About the team & the role:

We are hiring for the Platform Release team. The team is mostly responsible for helping our internal engineers release their software onto our infrastructure, in secure and measurable ways. They lead automation of the release processes (anywhere from CI/CD to bootstrapping) and help our internal engineering teams get on board with them using ‘golden path’ techniques, but also helping edge cases and making sure that teams can get the most out of our tools. 

At the end of the day, we’re the Platform Team for the teams that are building some of the most cherished Platform tools– from Grafana and Loki, to Tempo.

Who Are We Looking For?

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. Kubernetes and Docker are what we use, mostly. We also work with a lot of Infrastructure as Code, so be sure to check out Tanka/Jsonnet.

A few of our upcoming projects:

• Building and maintaining internal developer tooling such as Backstage.

• Consulting with internal development teams around tooling such as ArgoWF, Drone, Github, and others to ensure scalability and reliability.

Some ‘cherries on top’...

These things we feel might help people in our roles, but they are by no means requirements!

• You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously.

• Maybe there’s something missing in this job description that you think you might bring to our table? Feel free to let us know!

In the United States, the Base (OTE for commission positions) compensation range for this role is $116,000 - $140,000.  Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.