Engineering Manager - Databases SRE
This is a remote position and we're considering candidates in USA.
About the role:
We are looking for an Engineering Manager to help us grow and develop our Databases SRE team. Our managers take an active role in creating a productive environment for our engineers; be it through removing blockers and impediments, facilitating cross-team collaboration and understanding, or by aiding the team in helping themselves by constantly improving and refining their working practices. You’ll be responsible for managing a team of SREs working across a variety of systems and helping them to perform at their best.
The Databases SRE team are an SRE team focusing on our most valuable customers, and providing support to existing engineering teams with the configuration of dedicated customer environments, Helm charts, PRR (Product Readiness Review) process, making improvements to our core products, and acting as an overlay on-call to our existing devops on-call. This team is extremely valuable to the business and so it has high visibility and is a long-term investment by Grafana Labs.
What we seek:
- The core focus of the role is on people management but you should have enough technical skills/understanding of our stack to manage a highly technical team/product.
- You will act as project manager as well as working with product owners to ensure the product roadmap is defined and up-to-date
- You have a strong technical background, that leans towards SRE roles, and are capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenging teams to arrive at strong technical decisions themselves
- You will be comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision making, be it technical or product focussed
- Some customer facing experience will help, as participating in Bridge calls or interacting with customers will occasionally occur
- Experience calmly participating in incident response, following up, and writing PIRs (Post Incident Reviews, a.k.a. post-mortem documents)
- While you’re great with people and adept at managing relationships, you still keep up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts in order to maintain and enhance your understanding of the challenges your teams face
- Ideally you will have a Computer Science degree or equivalent experience from having worked as an SRE or CRE before moving into Management
- Whilst our backend is written in Go, and our frontend is React/TypeScript, we are Cloud Native and deploy on Kubernetes across all Cloud Service Providers, using Helm and Jsonnet — conceptual familiarity with Kubernetes and Helm is desired, exposure to distributed systems would be valuable.
Your day-to-day will include:
- Regular 1:1s to ensure your direct reports are motivated, happy and engaged
- Coaching and mentoring of your direct reports
- Providing continuous feedback to engineers to ensure that they can add value while maintaining high standards
- Contributing to and reviewing design documents for upcoming features
- Ensuring features are well-defined and ready for development
- Advising your reports on how to break down features into tasks
- Collaborating with our Engineering Leaders to help define and influence product strategy, roadmaps and technical designs
- Maintaining headcount by working with our People Ops team to attract and hire talent
In the US, the base compensation range for this role is $196,627 - $235,953. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed here.
*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
