Senior Platform Engineer (Platform Metal)

• Grafana Cloud moves millions of metrics, log lines, and traces per second from our customers’ environments into a highly available, low-latency stack that processes and stores this data, and serves them 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
• The Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) delivered by the Foundations group provides application engineers with the tools, systems and Kubernetes clusters they need to build, deploy and run their workloads
• We are hiring an engineer as part of the creation of a new Foundation’s “Metal” squad. This squad will be responsible for building and provisioning resources including storage, networking and Kubernetes clusters in new environments, starting with our own physical hardware. They will provide a Kubernetes control plane and underlying resources, outside public Cloud, to the rest of Engineering
• Management of our physical “Metal” environment from bare metal to kubernetes
• Management of cluster networking components: load balancing, NAT, DNS, CNIs, cross-cluster communication, Routing protocols, Architecture
• Management of scheduling and autoscaling
• Maintaining Crossplane compositions and Terraform modules for CSP resources common to our users. As well the management of versioning and compatibility for Crossplane and Terraform core as well as providers
• Work with our users (Grafana Cloud application teams) to help understand their needs and ensure we’re investing in the right capabilities

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption- You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity
• 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
• 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
• As such, being such a highly distributed company, means we would love someone who is keen on working with distributed systems, too
• 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
• Participation in an on-call rotation
• Datacenter experience
• Experience with Cluster-API, Tinkerbell, Talos and/or Ceph
• You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously. At Grafana Labs, “OSS is in our DNA”
• Experience with a few CSPs. We run Grafana Cloud on AWS, GCP, and Azure using each’s managed Kubernetes service - EKS, GKE, AKS
• Experience operating and managing workloads on Kubernetes. We use Tanka for configuration management with Jsonnet
• Familiarity with Kubernetes scheduling and projects like Karpenter
• Terraform and/or Crossplane experience. We have mixed usage - each has its strengths
• Enjoys programming in Go! We love building our own tools, utilities, exporters, etc. that suit our needs and otherwise don’t exist (and open sourcing them)
• Maybe there’s something missing in this job description that you think you might bring to our table? Feel free to let us know!