Senior Software Engineer (k6 Core)

• You will join a team of engineers responsible for building and maintaining k6, a performance testing tool written in Go. The team also maintains the open-source project, which means working directly on the product, the codebase, and with the community using it
• In this role, you will work on features and improvements across the k6 codebase, from initial idea through implementation and delivery. Much of the work involves problems that are not fully specified up front and require understanding the context, evaluating trade-offs, and choosing a reasonable technical approach
• You will work with a high degree of independence while collaborating closely with other engineers on design, implementation, and code reviews. You are expected to deliver production-quality code, maintain existing functionality, and help keep the system reliable and maintainable over time
• Some work may involve the k6 cloud offering, which builds on top of k6 to run distributed tests across data centers worldwide. This includes Go services that support distributed execution and require careful attention to performance, correctness, and failure modes
• Because the team is small, your work will have a direct and visible impact on the product and its users. You will work alongside experienced engineers in an environment that values clarity, pragmatism, and sound engineering judgment
• We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You’ll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google
• We start with problems, not prescriptions. Engineers are expected to understand the constraints, propose a pragmatic design, and carry the work through to delivery. We move deliberately and release on a regular cadence of roughly every six weeks. Between releases, we focus on small, safe, incremental changes
• Work is asynchronous by default, with decisions captured in pull requests and short design notes. Meetings are used for alignment rather than status updates. Code reviews focus on correctness, long-term maintainability, and user impact. When trade-offs are required, we aim to make them explicit and reversible. The team owns the product end to end, including architecture, releases, user-facing behavior, and the health of the open-source project
• We’re looking for an experienced engineer with strong programming skills and a track record of working on non-trivial systems

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- Strong experience building production software in Go, or another language with good support for concurrency and parallelism
• The ability to work independently on scoped problems and deliver them to completion
• Experience with modern development practices, including testing, code review, and iterative development
• Clear technical communication skills, especially in code reviews and design discussions
• A good understanding of internet protocols such as HTTP, gRPC, and WebSockets, with some familiarity with lower-level networking concepts
• Experience working on larger or long-lived codebases
• Tools and platforms such as Docker, AWS, microservices architectures, and observability tools like Grafana or APM systems
• JavaScript and/or TypeScript
• Backend systems for web or mobile applications
• Performance, reliability, or network testing and optimization
• Distributed systems or cloud-based services
• Contributing to or maintaining open-source projects
• Prior experience using k6 in production, or contributing to the k6 project or ecosystem
• You do not need experience with everything listed below. These are areas where familiarity is useful for the role, and the more you bring, the easier the ramp-up will be: