Senior Engineering Manager - Grafana Frontend

Senior Engineering Manager, Grafana Frontend 

The Opportunity: 

Grafana is an open-source observability product and a platform that teams and plugin developers build on. The Frontend group shapes its user experience (from dashboards and visualisation to navigation, search and sharing) and the foundations that support engineering teams and community contributors across the Grafana ecosystem.

As Senior Engineering Manager, you’ll lead the Frontend Platform and Navigation squads, owning their performance, delivery and customer outcomes. Frontend Platform enables teams to build reliable, high-quality experiences; Navigation helps users find and organise resources and move confidently through Grafana.

You’ll develop senior engineers, partner with Product and Design, and improve how teams work, including through AI and automation. We use Cloud-first rollout and experimentation to learn quickly, bringing relevant improvements to OSS and Enterprise.

AI Notice: We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• Be accountable for the performance of two distributed engineering squads: set clear expectations, delegate effectively, coach and develop each team member, give timely feedback, address performance gaps and build a culture of trust and accountability.
• Own hiring and team planning across both squads, aligning team capacity and skills with product priorities and longer-term needs.
• Lead discovery with your squads: engage directly with customers, community members and internal users, combine their feedback with research and usage evidence, and use those insights to shape roadmaps and priorities.
• Partner with Product, Design and engineering leaders to set priorities, resolve dependencies and make trade-offs between customer needs, long-term investments and operational demands.
• Own delivery across both squads from discovery through rollout and measurement: set milestones, surface risks early and intervene when commitments are at risk.
• Use AI regularly in your management work to synthesise research and feedback, inform roadmap and resourcing decisions, and streamline coordination, reporting and follow-through.
• Improve how the squads plan, make decisions and deliver. Lead the adoption of AI and automation across engineering and operational workflows, evaluating their impact on delivery speed, quality and time spent on repetitive work.
• Set engineering direction with senior engineers for the frontend foundations owned by your squads, including developer experience, accessibility, architecture, tooling, reliability and multitenant capabilities.
• Set engineering direction for navigation, search and resource organisation, including where AI-assisted discovery can help users find what they need.
• Set and uphold engineering standards for quality, security and operability, including how teams evaluate and validate AI-assisted work.
• Lead improvements across Grafana and R&D that increase engineering productivity and improve business outcomes.
• Participate in the engineering management on-call rota, coordinate responses and drive improvements that reduce recurring disruption. Regularly use Grafana’s AI capabilities for observability, incident investigation and management, bringing that experience into product feedback and roadmap decisions.

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Significant experience managing senior engineers, building healthy teams and developing technical leaders. You give clear feedback and address performance gaps directly and fairly.
• A strong technical foundation in modern web or frontend systems, enabling you to evaluate technical trade-offs and shape architectural and engineering-quality decisions with senior engineers.
• A track record of turning ambiguous, cross-team problems into clear priorities and measurable results, managing delivery risks and operational demands.
• Strong product and customer judgement, with the ability to connect engineering investments to user, developer and business outcomes.
• Clear, concise written communication and the ability to work effectively in a remote, globally distributed organisation.
• An appreciation for open-source development and the judgement to balance Cloud-first delivery with the needs of customers, community members and internal teams.
• Practical experience using AI and automation in your own leadership work, and leading teams to adopt them effectively. 

Bonus Points For

• Experience with React, TypeScript or comparable large-scale frontend ecosystems.
• Experience leading a developer platform team, including support for plugins or extensions.
• Experience with navigation, search, information architecture or resource-management products.
• Experience delivering multitenant SaaS or major platform migrations.
• Experience working on a widely adopted open-source product.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 124,571- EUR 149,485. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. 

All of our 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.