Senior Software Engineer - k6 Core

Role Description

At k6, we build reliability and performance testing tools for developers and QA engineers. Grafana k6 is an open-source project focused on making performance testing practical, approachable, and useful in real-world engineering workflows. We care deeply about developer experience, correctness, and scalability. k6 is part of the Grafana ecosystem and is used by engineers to test and understand systems under real load.

You will join a team of engineers responsible for building and maintaining k6, a performance testing tool written in Go. The team also maintains the open-source project, which means working directly on the product, the codebase, and with the community using it.

In this role, you will:

• Work on features and improvements across the k6 codebase, from initial idea through implementation and delivery.
• Handle problems that are not fully specified up front, requiring understanding the context, evaluating trade-offs, and choosing a reasonable technical approach.
• Collaborate closely with other engineers on design, implementation, and code reviews.
• Deliver production-quality code, maintain existing functionality, and help keep the system reliable and maintainable over time.
• Work on the k6 cloud offering, which builds on top of k6 to run distributed tests across data centers worldwide.
• Have a direct and visible impact on the product and its users.

Qualifications

• Strong experience building production software in Go, or another language with good support for concurrency and parallelism.
• Experience working on larger or long-lived codebases.
• The ability to work independently on scoped problems and deliver them to completion.
• Clear technical communication skills, especially in code reviews and design discussions.
• A good understanding of internet protocols such as gRPC, and WebSockets, with some familiarity with lower-level networking concepts.
• Experience with modern development practices, including testing, code review, and iterative development.

Requirements

• Contributing to or maintaining open-source projects.
• Prior experience using k6 in production, or contributing to the k6 project or ecosystem.
• Performance, reliability, or network testing and optimization.
• Distributed systems or cloud-based services.
• JavaScript and/or TypeScript.
• Backend systems for web or mobile applications.
• Tools and platforms such as Docker, AWS, microservices architectures, and observability tools like Grafana or APM systems.

Benefits

• 100% Remote, Global Culture.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that 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 – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In-Person onboarding – We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
• Balance is Key – We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum.