Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services | UK | Remote
About the role
Senior Software Engineer - Grafana Databases, Managed Services
The Managed Services team is a newly formed squad within the Databases department. It owns and operates shared, production-critical infrastructure that powers Grafana Cloud’s next-generation database products (Mimir, Loki, and Tempo). Today, this includes operating 100+ WarpStream clusters across multiple cloud providers and regions, with continued growth anticipated for the future. WarpStream acts as the streaming backbone for ingestion and read/write decoupling across databases. It sits directly on the hot path for metrics, logs, and traces, handling high-throughput, multi-consumer workloads at massive scale.
In addition to streaming infrastructure, the team works closely with high-volume analytical and storage systems that power query-heavy and aggregation-heavy workloads, where latency, compression behavior, storage layout, and scaling characteristics matter deeply.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Operating and evolving 100+ multi-cloud streaming clusters and related database infrastructure
- Diagnosing and eliminating cross-layer failure modes (e.g., object storage latency, noisy neighbors, control-plane bottlenecks, query performance regressions, etc.)
- Designing safe upgrade and rollout strategies at scale
- Improving observability, automation, and operational ergonomics
- Partnering closely with database and platform teams to ensure safe scaling, partitioning, consumer fan-out, and query performance
- Working directly with distributed systems behavior, Kubernetes scheduling dynamics, storage engines, compression trade-offs, etc.
- Serving as a primary escalation point and on-call for relevant incidents
- Owning the relationship with all system vendors, including WarpStream Labs and others.
- As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are essential.