About the role
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X .
We’re scaling fast and staying true to what makes us different: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust fuel everything we do.
You may not meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If this role excites you, we’d love you to raise your hand for what could be a truly career-defining opportunity.
The Opportunity:
We are looking for an Incentive Compensation Systems Manager to join our Incentive Compensation (IC) team and drive the systemization, automation, and continuous improvement of our commission operations. This is a high-impact, individual contributor role with end-to-end ownership, reporting to the Senior Manager, Incentive Compensation. To be successful, you should look forward to operating in an unstructured, fast-paced, remote-first environment where you will identify gaps in existing processes, replace manual workarounds with scalable systems, and bring greater predictability, accuracy, and speed to how the business manages commissions, quotas, and comp plan administration.
In this role, you will gain deep exposure to how incentive compensation data flows end-to-end from our CRM (e.g., SFDC), People systems (e.g., Workday) through calculation engines (e.g., Xactly) to payout and reporting (e.g., BigQuery). You'll be the person the team turns to when a process is slow, fragile, or held together by spreadsheets. You will partner closely with our Incentive Compensation Operations Team, Finance & Strategy, People Ops, and RevOps orgs to understand how work actually gets done today, find the friction points, and build the tooling and workflows that remove them. This role requires a unique balance: enough technical depth to design and build real automation, combined with the process discipline and cross-functional judgment to know which problems are worth solving first.
What You’ll Be Doing:
• Process & Gap Assessment: Embed with the IC team to map current-state workflows across plan administration, calculation, approvals, and payout. Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone steps and prioritize them based on risk, time cost, and business impact.
• Systematization & Automation: Design and build automated workflows, integrations, and tooling that replace manual processes from data pulls and reconciliations to approval routing and exception handling. Reduce reliance on ad-hoc spreadsheets and one-off scripts in favor of durable, repeatable systems.
• Xactly ICM Ownership: Serve as a hands-on owner of our Xactly instances (e.g., Incent and Connect) configuring calculation rules, plan logic, and workflows, and continuously tuning the platform so it does more of the heavy lifting currently done manually outside the system.
• AI-Enabled Process Automation: Identify where AI tools and LLM-driven agents can take over manual, repetitive Incentive Compensation work such as exception detection, data reconciliation, plan document review, or answering common comp questions and build the workflows/integrations to put them into production.
• Systems Integration: Partner with IC, Finance & Strategy, People Ops, Revenue Operations, and IT/Data teams to ensure incentive compensation systems are properly integrated, with clean, reliable data flowing between them.
• Documentation & Governance: Establish clear documentation, standard operating procedures, and controls for newly systematized processes, so they're auditable, maintainable, and don't regress back into manual work over time.
• Continuous Improvement Cadence: Set up a repeatable process for the IC team to keep identifying and retiring manual work, as an ongoing discipline of finding the next bottleneck and fixing it.
• Cross-Functional Enablement: Act as the go-to resource translating IC process needs into system requirements, and translating system/data constraints back into practical process recommendations the team can act on.
• Operational Excellence: Support urgent, ad-hoc requests during payout cycles while keeping an eye on the long-term goal. Building yourself out of the fire-fighting role by systemizing the fixes.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
• Professional Experience: 5+ years of experience in incentive compensation, sales operations, revenue operations, or a related systems/process improvement role. Experience in a fast-paced technology or SaaS business is highly preferred.
• Process Improvement Mindset: A demonstrated track record of finding manual, broken, or inefficient processes and systematizing them, not just documenting problems but building the solution.
• SQL & Data Fluency: Hands-on SQL experience and comfort querying and reconciling data across systems to diagnose process gaps and validate automated outputs.
• Automation & Tooling: Hands-on experience building automated workflows using tools such as scripting, workflow/RPA platforms, or ICM systems (e.g., Xactly, CaptivateIQ, Varicent, SPIFF platforms). Com