Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Metal | Germany | Remote

Overview

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company with a global impact. Grafana dashboards are used by millions of users and organizations worldwide to monitor diverse environments. We offer Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Stack, featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

We’re scaling fast while staying true to our open-source legacy, global collaboration, and meaningful work. We foster transparency, autonomy, and trust. This role is remote; candidates in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, and the UK are considered.

The Opportunity

Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Metal

About our Platform: Grafana Cloud moves metrics, log lines, and traces per second from customer environments into a highly available, low-latency stack. We aim to grow this to hundreds of millions per second, improving performance and reliability while maintaining efficiency.

The Internal Engineering Platform (IEP) provides engineers with the tools, systems, and Kubernetes clusters needed to build, deploy, and run workloads. We are creating a new Platform “Metal” squad to build and provision resources including storage, networking, and Kubernetes clusters in new environments, starting with our own physical hardware. The squad will provide a Kubernetes control plane and underlying resources outside public Cloud to the rest of Engineering.

What You'll Be Doing

• Hire, manage, and develop a team of engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations.
• Collaborate with product, design, and engineering leadership to define goals that move the squad forward and align with broader business objectives.
• Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from ideation through planning, execution, and post-launch, guiding the team to deliver high-quality results consistently.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment, and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.

We invest heavily in developer productivity and support AI-assisted development within security guidelines. You’ll have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro) as part of a company-supported tooling budget.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Demonstrable experience building and managing on-prem/bare metal environments.
• Self-starter with a strong bias toward action and ownership, able to navigate ambiguity and drive work forward in complex problem spaces.
• Comfort collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication to build trust and psychological safety.
• Experience guiding and supporting other engineers, leading initiatives or small teams, and collaborating effectively to drive projects to successful outcomes.
• Ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
• Customer-focused, grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and real-world impact.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, production-readiness, and observability.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling and experience folding AI into a team’s workflow.

Bonus Points For

• Running Kubernetes and/or Ceph in production environments
• Experience dealing with colo facilities and associated vendors
• Open source or community-based project experience; OSS is in Grafana Labs’ DNA

Compensation notes: In Germany, the base compensation range is EUR 120,000 - EUR 151,000. Actual compensation varies by level, experience, and skillset as assessed during interviews. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
Note: Compensation ranges are country-specific. If applying from a location not listed above, the recruiter will discuss your market’s pay range and benefits at the start of the process.

Why You’ll Thrive At Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization and meaningful work
• Transparent Communication and open decision-making
• Innovation-Driven with autonomy and support
• Open Source Roots and community-driven values
• Empowered Teams with high trust and focus on outcomes
• Career Growth Pathways and defined opportunities to grow
• Approachable Leadership and involved executives
• Passionate People and collaborative team environment
• In-Person onboarding to help you thrive from day 1
• Global annual leave policy of 30 days, with 3 days designated for Grafana Shutdown Days

Equal Opportunity Employer: We recruit, train, compensate, and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. Grafana Labs is committed to equality and diversity as the foundation of our organization. We may use AI tools in the recruitment process to assist in matching information from CVs to postings, with manual review of inbound CVs.

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