Software Engineer - Platform Metal (Remote, Ireland)

About the Company and Role

Grafana Labs is the creator of the open observability cloud, built on open source, standards, ecosystem, and culture principles. Their Grafana Cloud platform handles huge volumes of data for monitoring and incident management, trusted by over 7,000 customers worldwide including major enterprises like Bloomberg and Microsoft. Operating fully remotely with a diverse global team of over 1,600 members, they are committed to autonomy, transparency, and meaningful collaboration.

Role Overview

This position is part of the Foundations group's Internal Engineering Platform (IEP), focusing on delivering tools, systems, and Kubernetes clusters to support application engineers. The new "Metal" squad will manage and provision infrastructure resources such as physical hardware, storage, networking, and Kubernetes control planes outside public clouds. Initially, this will involve working with the company’s own physical servers.

Key Responsibilities

• Oversee management of physical "Metal" environments from raw hardware through Kubernetes deployment.
• Handle cluster networking components including load balancers, NAT, DNS, CNIs, routing protocols, and facilitate cross-cluster communications.
• Manage scheduling systems and autoscaling mechanisms within Kubernetes.
• Maintain Crossplane compositions and Terraform modules for common cloud service provider resources, including versioning and compatibility of related tools and providers.
• Collaborate closely with Grafana Cloud application teams to understand requirements and prioritize platform capabilities effectively.

Required Qualifications and Attributes

• Experience working in or managing datacenter environments.
• Familiarity with participating in on-call rotations to support production systems.
• Ability to work collaboratively with both engineers and management in a remote-first culture that values open communication, respect, and consensus-driven decision-making.
• Enthusiasm for learning and professional growth in a knowledge-sharing team environment.
• Comfort with the full software development lifecycle, including design documentation, developer feedback, and integration testing—primarily using Go, Python, and Shell scripting.
• Experience operating code in production environments, bridging both operator and developer perspectives.

Preferred Additional Skills

• Experience with technologies such as Cluster-API, Tinkerbell, Talos, and Ceph.
• Contributions to open source or community-driven projects, reflecting the company's core OSS value.
• Hands-on experience with multiple cloud service providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), especially managed Kubernetes services like EKS, GKE, and AKS.
• Knowledge operating Kubernetes workloads using tools such as Tanka with Jsonnet.
• Understanding of Kubernetes scheduling and autoscaling projects like Karpenter.
• Proficiency with infrastructure as code tools, especially Terraform and Crossplane.
• A passion for programming in Go to build custom tools and utilities, with an interest in open sourcing them.

Compensation and Benefits

The salary range for candidates in Ireland is €81,600 to €97,920 annually, subject to experience, skills, and interview assessment. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) which provide shared ownership in Grafana Labs. Compensation for other locations will be discussed with recruiters.

Why Join Grafana Labs?

• Fully remote global work environment fostering collaboration and shared mission.
• Opportunity to impact a fast-growing, innovation-driven company.
• Transparent leadership and open decision-making.
• Strong open-source culture and empowered teams focusing on results.
• Defined career advancement paths and supportive leadership.
• In-person onboarding to integrate successfully from day one.
• Generous leave policy of 30 days annually including company-wide shutdown days.

Equality and Data Use

Grafana Labs champions equal opportunity employment and diversity. They welcome applicants regardless of any legally protected characteristic and value building a diverse organization. AI tools may be used in recruitment to augment CV-job matching, but all applications are reviewed manually.