Senior Engineering Manager – Corporate Engineering
Grafana Labs is a remote‑first, open‑source powerhouse. More than 20 M users of Grafana, the open‑source visualization tool, rely on it worldwide, from beehives to climate change monitoring, NASA launches to Minecraft HQ, Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps over 3,000 companies—including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase and eBay—manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self‑managed with Grafana Enterprise. The stack includes scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki) and traces (Grafana Tempo).
We’re scaling fast while staying true to what makes us unique: an open‑source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation‑driven environment where transparency, autonomy and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for a truly career‑defining opportunity.
This is a remote position. Candidates are considered only in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Ireland and the UK.
About The Team
We are a technical Corporate Engineering team, ensuring stakeholders across Grafana have the technology they need to excel. Our remit includes the historic management of corporate systems—IT operations, internal helpdesk, corporate security and service development—as well as the future of corporate systems, where developers and non‑technical employees alike build automations, ship internal applications and deploy background agentic workloads. We provide core systems and platforms to optimise our current and future stacks, enabling all employees to own their own workflows.
We can build any tool we need, while knowing when to buy to improve velocity. We support a highly autonomous, technical, 100 % remote, cloud‑native organisation that embraces agile principles and values, shares openly, defaults to action and has an OSS‑first mindset. We balance high‑velocity expectations with sustainable timeframes, giving people the room to do great work while keeping our souls intact.
The Opportunity
We are looking for a leader to curate and drive our Corporate Engineering team. You will finish the optimisation of our current IT operations stack and be the driver of our internal AI‑native strategy. You want to push decision‑making to where the right information is, rather than centralising approvals, and you can build the processes and systems that enable all teams to experiment and own their own tools. You embody DevOps principles and groan at long lead or approval times. You see shadow IT as a signal that we have a gap, rather than something to be controlled.
You will lead a team that manages the operation and security of traditional corporate IT systems, help desk queues and employee hardware, while also providing tools and platforms that other teams can operate with effectively. Your team is significantly responsible for the operational and security strategy for internal AI usage, agentic workloads and general automation at Grafana. You will guide your team in building and delivering internal platforms that automate typical IT work and enable employees to do their best work seamlessly. You must have significant engineering acumen in this highly technology‑driven role.
This is a high‑impact opportunity to define what IT and corporate systems look like in the AI age at a technical, everything‑as‑code company. You will have a fully staffed team and significant autonomy to achieve objectives. If you read "The Phoenix Project" and "Seat at the Table" / "Art of Business Value" and it struck a chord, then you are the next engineering leader we are looking for.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Lead the team covering a range of existing areas, including corporate systems, employee device lifecycles, helpdesk queues and internal tooling development.
- Handle corporate security initiatives, deploying security and compliance checks in an employee‑enabling way (guardrails and paved roads) in their daily workflows.
- Help define our wider internal AI rollout, enablement and security strategy across all teams, not just developers.
- Manage the relationships, negotiation and contracting with core SaaS vendors.
- Make all work and costs visible, both internally to the team and enable stakeholder teams to understand their processes and work. Use this visibility to continuously improve processes.
- Understand and, where possible, leverage the Grafana product and ecosystem to solve corporate engineering challenges. Open‑source what we come up with for the good of other Grafana users.
- Act as a leader within the larger Foundations department, including all other platform, business application and security teams.
- Conduct regular 1:1s, coaching and mentoring to ensure team members are motivated, happy and engaged. Provide continuous feedback to ensure they can add value while maintaining high standards.
- Participate in team activities, be a participant in all work queues, contribute to and review design documents for upcoming projects, ensuring projects are well‑defined and ready for development. Serve in the team’s on‑call rotation.
What Makes You a Great Fit
- Experience running a software engineering operations team. You have a strong engineering background and are capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenging teams to arrive at strong technical decisions themselves. You understand at least one cloud provider well and have working knowledge of Kubernetes.
- Deep hands‑on experience managing and automating corporate IT systems commonly used by modern tech companies, including a gamut of operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android), SSO (Okta, 1Password), workplace productivity tools (Google Workspace, Office), MDM (Jamf, Intune, FleetDM, Kolide), EDR, DLP, typical corporate SaaS platforms (Salesforce, Zendesk), AI providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Google, etc.) and managing employee laptops and devices.
- You approach IT and corporate security with a DevOps mindset, preferring enablement, automation and guardrails over gates and roadblocks. You have experience providing internal platforms to other teams and see IT as a provider of tools, platforms and automation, rather than a ticket‑taking service provider.
- Knowledge of the current AI state of the art and strong ideas on how to leverage effectively and safely across the enterprise in a way that enables experimentation rather than locking the organisation into yesterday’s technology.
- You are deeply curious about software, security and the current and future states of technology. You keep your teams ahead of the curve.
- You are an excellent written and verbal communicator who can articulate complex concepts to both technical and non‑technical audiences. You are comfortable working with engineering teams that have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision‑making, and guiding via influence.
- Work Eastern‑time oriented hours. Grafana Labs is a global company, and we need to maximise overlap time with our EMEA peers.
Bonus Points
- A technical background, ideally with programming or software engineering experience before transitioning into leadership. Experience with Go, multiple cloud providers and Kubernetes expertise is a great plus.
- Significant experience leveraging and securing AI tooling for all core personas (non‑development, code, agentic automation).
- A ready plan for how to secure AI.
- Working knowledge of Grafana Labs OSS projects and products, and experience using observability tooling to solve IT or security problems.
- Experience working with OSS communities.
Compensation
- In the UK, the base compensation range for this role is GBP 117,000–GBP 147,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs’ success. We believe in shared outcomes—RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.
- 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.
Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs
- 100 % Remote, Global Culture—As a remote‑only company, we bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
- Scaling Organisation—Tackle meaningful work in a high‑growth, ever‑evolving environment.
- Transparent Communication—Expect open decision‑making and regular company‑wide updates.
- Innovation‑Driven—Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
- Open Source Roots—Built on community‑driven values that shape how we work.
- Empowered Teams—High trust, low‑ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
- Career Growth Pathways—Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
- Approachable Leadership—Transparent execs who are involved, visible and human.
- Passionate People—Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
- In‑Person onboarding—We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new “Grafanistas” to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
- Balance is Key—We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. Three days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.
Equal Opportunity Employer
We will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status and all the other fascinating characteristics that make us different and unique. We believe that equality and diversity builds a strong organisation and we’re working hard to make that the foundation of our organisation as we grow.
Grafana Labs may utilise AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
For information about how your personal data is used once you’ve applied to a job, check out our privacy policy.
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