Senior Engineering Manager - Corporate Engineering

About the team

We are a technical Corporate Engineering team, ensuring stakeholders across Grafana have the technology they need to excel. This covers the historical way of managing corporate systems, including IT Operations, Internal Helpdesk, Corporate Security, and service development. It also covers the future of corporate systems, where developers and non‑technical employees alike need to build automations, ship internal applications, and deploy background agentic workloads. Our job is to provide the core systems and platforms to optimize our current and future stacks and enable 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 organization. To support our growth and ambitious vision, we embrace agile principles and values, share openly, default to action, and have an OSS‑first mindset. We believe in high‑velocity but sustainable expectations and 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 be responsible for finishing the optimization of our current IT operations stack and be the driver of our internal AI‑native strategy. You want to push decision‑making to wherever the right information is, rather than centralizing approvals, and you can build the processes and systems to enable all teams to experiment and own their own tools. You embody DevOps principles, and long lead or approval times fill you with dread. 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, but also provides tools and platforms for other teams to effectively operate in. Your team is also 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 our employees to do their best work seamlessly. You must have significant engineering acumen as this is a highly technology‑driven role.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team covering corporate systems, employee device lifecycles, help‑desk queues, and internal tooling development.
• Handle corporate security initiatives, deploying security and compliance checks in an employee‑enabling way (guardrails and paved roads) in daily workflows.
• Define our wider internal AI rollout, enablement, and security strategy across all teams, not just developers.
• Manage relationships, negotiation, and contracting with core SaaS vendors.
• Make all work and costs visible internally to the team and enable stakeholder teams to understand their processes and work; use this visibility to continuously improve processes.
• Leverage the Grafana product and ecosystem to solve corporate engineering challenges and open‑source solutions for the broader Grafana community.
• 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.
• Participate in team activities, contribute to and review design documents for upcoming projects, and be part of the team’s and department’s on‑call rotation.

Requirements

• Experience running a software engineering operations team with a strong engineering background; capable of engaging in technical conversations and challenging teams to arrive at strong technical decisions.
• Solid understanding of at least one cloud provider and working knowledge of Kubernetes.
• Deep hands‑on experience managing and automating corporate IT systems commonly used by modern tech companies, including 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.
• DevOps mindset toward IT and corporate security, preferring enablement, automation, and guardrails over gates and roadblocks; experience providing internal platforms to other teams.
• Knowledge of the current AI state of the art and strong ideas on how to leverage it safely and effectively across the enterprise to enable experimentation.
• Deep curiosity about software, security, and emerging technologies; ability to keep teams ahead of the curve.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to articulate complex concepts to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Comfortable working with engineering teams that have strong autonomy, guiding via influence.
• Willingness to work Eastern‑time‑oriented hours to maximize overlap with EMEA peers.

Bonus Points

• Technical background with programming or software engineering experience before transitioning into leadership; experience with Go, multiple cloud providers, and Kubernetes is a 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 (Spain)

• Base compensation range: EUR 106,000 – EUR 133,000 (actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset).
• All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100 % Remote, Global Culture – Remote‑only company with talent worldwide, united by collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Meaningful work in a high‑growth, ever‑evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Open decision‑making and regular company‑wide updates.
• Innovation‑Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Community‑driven values 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 – Smart, supportive colleagues who care deeply about what they do.
• In‑Person Onboarding – Supportive onboarding to help you thrive from day 1.
• Balance is Key – Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow real disconnect.

Remote position; candidates considered in Germany, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, and the UK only.