Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Databases

This is a remote position and we're considering candidates in the United States only. 

About the role:

We are looking for a Senior SRE to help us support our highest-value Grafana Cloud customers by increasing the reliability of our Cloud databases that are based on Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope. We provide these databases as a SaaS product from AWS, GCP, and Azure across all regions.

The SRE team is a new team within the Databases department, that owns the environments (customer and product cells) for our largest customers and acts as an overlay to existing teams that run the databases within the system. As an SRE within the team, you own the configuration of the software via Helm charts and Jsonnet, being involved with the PRR for new features, shepherding releases to the environment and ensuring new releases do not degrade the SLOs or user experience for the customer (learn what is special about each of these customers, and mitigate risks that might be produced by a change in the software), directly contributing design docs, code, PR review, and other engineering activities to the databases to further improve reliability for the customer, observability of the customer stack, and making recommendations to customers about their use of the system to further improve reliability. Like all SRE roles there is an on-call element, unlike other roles this one is a shared pager where “if the Mimir team are paged for this customer, then we are also paged”, this allows you to focus your response on the experience the customer has, whilst also being supported by another on-call engineer who will focus on the system. As a company, we hire globally (remote-only) to ensure our on-call is as healthy as possible, and aligned to 12 daylight hours per day as the default.

What we seek:

• Strong engineering background (at least 6 years), that lean towards SRE roles (at least 3 years)

  • This may encompass but is not limited to experience as a reliability/production engineer, infrastructure/systems engineer, or software engineer with an infrastructure/systems focus.

• Good communication, capable of engaging in deep technical conversations with other engineers and customers, and collaborating across organizational boundaries

• Experience with Kubernetes on any of AWS, GCP, or Azure, and working with Helm charts or other IaC tools.

• Experience with Site Reliability Engineering, Large System Design, and Distributed Computing

• 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)

• Comfortable working within an engineering team where individuals are encouraged to have a strong sense of autonomy and self-direction.

• 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)

Your day-to-day will include:

• Regular 1:1s 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 the 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 collaborate with other engineers on their Design Docs

• Teach others about Site Reliability Engineering and communicate best practices to be applied early in the 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

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 148,505 - USD 178,206.  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.

*Compensation ranges are country-specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.