So we're constantly hiring and growing across the company but also in my team. My team works on the OSS cortexmetrics.io timeseries database and runs the hosted Prometheus service on GrafanaCloud. On most days whenever I come across a cool idea around a use-case, feature or a hack, I wish we had twice as many engineers on the team to build that. We just don't have enough bandwidth in the team for exploring all the offshoot ideas :(

The good news is we're going to more than double our team in 2021! But yesterday, while dealing with 3 different user facing issues, I felt the need for more engineers in my bones! So I decided to write down the following blurb that I can share around in my circle:

We have an amazing culture

Seriously, everyone says it, but I know that GrafanaLabs' culture is its superpower. Everyone loves working here and in the 2.5yrs I was here I saw very few people leave from my org. My take on our culture is going to be long enough to warrant a blog on its own, but we published the cultural values that drive us. Do give it a read!

One thing I want to highlight is that company truly cares about work-life balance and it shows. Working long hours is heavily discouraged and your manager checks in with you every week and I'm seeing the company launch more and more well-being initiatives every month!

And best of all, we have 30 days + local holidays vacation policy and you're so strongly encouraged to use up all your days that its almost a mandatory 30days vacation policy!

We have an amazing team

Okay, all teams in Grafana Labs are amazing, but mine especially so :D I work with so many brilliant and compassionate people! I adore everyone and I can't think of a better band of people to work with! I can't wait for the COVID shitshow to be over so I can hug them and just hang out in person! I can't wait for Josh to teach me skiing!

Trust me folks, you won't regret joining us. And you'll really enjoy the ride with us.

We solve hard problems

When I joined the company, this team was just formed and it was just me and Tom Wilkie. I felt insane amounts of impostor syndrome working with the genius that Tom is. Even today 2.5yrs later, I am constantly amazed by all the magic my team pulls off. We're building a distributed, highly scalable database. And its all hard problems.

We've spent the first half of the year working on a brand new storage engine that is completely dependent on an ObjectStore, is 3x cheaper to run and faster! We've spent the last couple of months fixing the last of scalability problems to scale the new engine to 1000s of tenants. We now support a scale of several hundred million active series on the new storage and we already have customers asking for and testing Cortex with a billion series. We know the current engine doesn't scale that far and making it push 10s of millions of samples a second would require new storage formats and algorithms.

I have extremely brilliant engineers on my team, for example Marco and Peter who come up with brilliant design docs that constantly blow my mind. If you love low-level databases or high-level distributed systems problems, this is for you.

We generate loooooots of value

We have 1000s of customers depending on our product. When I say depending, I mean depending! They need us to make sure their services are working. They need us to debug and quickly fix outages. We need to extremely highly reliable for them to trust us. And in exchange they give us millions of $$!

The work you do will immediately go out to production and immediately impact both our business and that of our customers. Its a very very powerful feeling.

OSS in our blood

90% of the work we do is open-source. And this allows us to constantly talk about all the cool stuff we do, through blog-posts, conference and podcasts! Cortex's adoption has been a little slow in the beginning but ever since we had the bandwidth we focused on making it easier to use and focused on our documentation and community. All of our work is now paying off, I have 4 new case studies lined up which I scheduled in just the past couple of weeks. More and more companies are adopting Cortex and we love it.

We're hiring. In my team. Everywhere.

Anyways, these are just a few reasons why you should consider joining us. We're hiring all around the world and we're a truly distributed team (and company!). Funnily enough, if other teams wrote a post like this, it will sound very similar ;)

If you're interested in a role in my team or other teams in Grafana, please reach out to me on Twitter or via email: goutham [at] grafana.com

And if you want to see open-roles: https://grafana.com/about/careers/ but we're constantly hiring everywhere, so feel free to reach out even if you don't see something there.