Engineering Manager, Identity and Access

About Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. With over 20 million users globally, Grafana, the open-source visualization tool, monitors everything from beehives to climate change. Its iconic dashboards are recognized worldwide. Grafana Labs also assists over 3,000 companies, including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay, in managing their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, available fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with Grafana Enterprise Stack, featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

We are rapidly scaling while maintaining our core identity: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a dedication to meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust are paramount.

We encourage applications even if you don't meet every single requirement; this could be a truly career-defining opportunity.

This is a remote opportunity, and we are interested in applicants based in the United States (excluding PST timezones) at this time.

The Opportunity: Engineering Manager, Identity and Access

Millions of users depend on Grafana daily to monitor critical system health and performance. The Identity and Access team develops Grafana’s sign-in and permission systems. Our mission is clear: ensure seamless sign-in for end-users and provide clear, secure, and predictable access controls for administrators.

The IAM team manages authentication and authorization across both Grafana's open-source and proprietary codebases. Our responsibilities include SAML, LDAP, OAuth/OIDC, JWT, and role-based access control (RBAC), sometimes delving into deep protocol details.

Currently, the IAM team is redesigning Grafana’s edge authentication and multitenant storage for identity resources, offering a unique chance to work on modern identity infrastructure at scale. Our code operates in critical request paths, meaning design choices directly influence performance, reliability, and security across all Grafana Labs products.

The team is geographically distributed across EMEA and NASA.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Manage and grow a distributed team of engineers, conducting regular 1:1s and providing consistent feedback to support performance and career development.
• Partner with product management and engineering leadership to define the IAM roadmap, balancing security needs, platform requirements, and customer impact.
• Guide the team through the complete project lifecycle: from initial design and scoping to delivery and post-launch iteration, ensuring high-quality and timely outcomes.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional partners including security, platform, cloud infrastructure, and the broader Grafana engineering organization to drive initiatives spanning team boundaries.
• Foster a team culture rooted in security-first thinking, technical rigor, and a respectful environment that empowers individuals to perform their best work.
• Contribute to technical discussions, assisting the team in making robust architectural decisions regarding authentication flows and multi-tenant design.

As a remote-first organization with an entirely remote engineering team, strong independent work ethic, excellent communication skills, and transparency are essential for success through video calls and guided collaboration.

We prioritize developer productivity. You'll have access to modern AI coding assistants (your choice, within security guidelines) with a company-funded budget, enabling quick iteration without friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development for faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups, always maintaining strong code review and quality standards. You'll also utilize frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro).

What Makes You a Great Fit

• You take initiative, follow through, and can advance work in a complex, security-sensitive area, even when not everything is fully defined.
• Experienced in people management: conducting meaningful 1:1s, delivering candid feedback, supporting career growth, and handling performance conversations.
• You trust your reports to execute, focusing on setting direction, aligning on outcomes, and identifying risks early, rather than task-level oversight. You assess performance by impact and delivery.
• Transparent and direct by default, sharing organizational context and treating reports as partners. You clearly advocate for your reports when they are not present.
• You publicly support your reports' decisions and escalate as needed to resolve cross-team conflicts. When priorities clash, you make the call or create a clear path to resolution, avoiding leaving your team in ambiguity.
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote setting, using clear and empathetic communication to build trust and a supportive team.

Requirements

• A strong software engineering background, ideally including backend systems experience with Go, sufficient to engage credibly in technical design discussions and guide engineers toward robust decisions.
• Familiarity with authentication and authorization concepts: OAuth 2.0, SAML, RBAC, OIDC, JWT. While not requiring a security expert, comfort in reasoning about identity and access problems is necessary.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles: scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Demonstrated ability to manage delivery across multiple concurrent projects, align stakeholders with competing priorities, and clearly communicate risks and timelines.
• Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding technical decisions in real-world user and administrator impact.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling. Curiosity and practical experience integrating AI-powered tools into a team's workflow are expected.
• Strong mentoring and leadership skills.

Bonus Points For

• Experience working in security-critical environments.
• Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source projects.
• Familiarity with observability tooling (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry).

Compensation & Rewards

In the United States, the compensation range for this role is USD 183,858 - 220,630. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset assessed during the interview process. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), providing every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success, aligning us as we scale globally.

Compensation ranges are country-specific. If applying from a different location, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s pay range and benefits.

Why You’ll Thrive At Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture: Unite with talent worldwide in a collaborative, remote-only environment.
• Scaling Organization: Engage in meaningful work within a high-growth, evolving company.
• Transparent Communication: Experience open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven: Enjoy autonomy and support to deliver great work and explore new ideas.
• Open Source Roots: Built on community-driven values that shape our work approach.
• Empowered Teams: Thrive in a high-trust, low-ego culture valuing outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways: Benefit from defined opportunities for career advancement and development.
• Approachable Leadership: Interact with transparent, visible, and human executives.
• Passionate People: Join a team of intelligent, supportive individuals dedicated to their work.
• In-Person Onboarding: Ensure a strong start with fellow 'Grafanistas' to learn our ways.
• Balance is Key: Utilize a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days for complete disconnection (local legislation permitting).

Grafana Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We recruit, train, compensate, and promote without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and all other diverse characteristics. We believe equality and diversity build a strong organization.

Grafana Labs may use AI tools in recruitment to match CVs to job postings, but the recruitment team will manually review all inbound CVs.

For personal data usage information, refer to our privacy policy.

Key skills/competency

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)
• Authentication and Authorization
• SAML, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, RBAC
• Distributed Systems
• Go Programming Language
• People Management
• Technical Leadership
• Security-first Principles
• Roadmap Development
• Cross-functional Collaboration