Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Metal | Sweden | Remote

Grafana Labs Grafana Labs · Data AI · EMEA, Germany, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom · Remote · R&D: Platform

Senior Engineering Manager for a new Platform "Metal" squad responsible for building and provisioning resources like storage, networking, and Kubernetes clusters in new environments, starting with their own physical hardware. This role will provide a Kubernetes control plane and underlying resources outside of public cloud for the rest of Engineering. The manager will hire, develop, and lead a team of engineers, collaborate with leadership on goals, guide the project lifecycle, and foster a psychologically safe environment. The role also involves working across team boundaries and partnering with other functions. Experience with AI-assisted tooling is mentioned as a comfort/curiosity requirement, but it is not the core craft of the role.

What you'd actually do

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

Skills

Required

  • experience building and managing on-prem/bare metal environments
  • strong bias toward action and ownership
  • navigate ambiguity and drive work forward in complex problem spaces
  • collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment
  • clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety
  • guiding and supporting other engineers
  • leading initiatives or small teams
  • collaborating effectively to drive projects to successful outcomes
  • manage complexity
  • align stakeholders
  • elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results
  • Deeply 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

Nice to have

  • Running Kubernetes and/or Ceph in production environments
  • Experience dealing with colo facilities and associated vendors
  • You’ve worked in or on open source, or other community-based projects previously

What the JD emphasized

  • building and provisioning resources including storage, networking and Kubernetes clusters in new environments
  • provide a Kubernetes control plane and underlying resources, outside public Cloud
  • managing on-prem/bare metal environments
  • Comfort with AI-assisted tooling. We embrace AI and agentic development, so we expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.