Engineering Manager, Observability Dept

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana around the globe. Grafana Labs helps more than 3,000 companies manage their observability strategies with the Grafana Cloud or self-managed Grafana Enterprise Stack, featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

The Observability department enables developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure by providing tools to instrument code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud and visualize and explore it. Alloy is a distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector that collects, processes, and exports telemetry signals at scale and is maintained as an open source project on GitHub.

This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the NASA (EST-only) or EMEA time zones. The Germany base compensation range for this role is EUR 109,709 - EUR 131,651. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed on the company careers page.

Responsibilities

• Manage and develop the team of Alloy engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations. The team is remote and distributed between EMEA and NASA (EST-only).
• Support the Alloy team on their path to closer collaboration with the OpenTelemetry collector community and address roadblocks.
• Collaborate closely with go-to-market to ensure customers and prospects are successful with their Alloy journey.
• Work closely with product and engineering leadership to ensure Alloy fits seamlessly into the end-to-end user experience for Grafana Cloud products.
• Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from early ideation through planning, execution and post‑launch, guiding the team to deliver high‑quality results consistently.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and continuous improvement.
• Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.

Requirements

• Domain knowledge in observability and OpenTelemetry sufficient to manage a team collaborating closely with the OpenTelemetry collector community.
• Comfortable working with autonomous engineering teams (technical and product decision-making).
• Keep up-to-date with technical trends to maintain and enhance understanding of team challenges.
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
• Deeply customer-focused, grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and real-world impact.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling and curiosity about integrating AI-powered tools into a team’s workflow (the company supports use of AI coding assistants and provides a usage budget).

Compensation & Benefits

• Germany base compensation range: EUR 109,709 - EUR 131,651 (actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset).
• Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits listed on the Grafana Labs careers page.
• 100% remote, global culture with an in-person onboarding. Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum (with 3 days reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days). The company will comply with local legislation where applicable.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• Remote-first, global culture and transparent communication.
• Opportunity to tackle meaningful work in a scaling organization built on open source roots.
• Emphasis on autonomy, innovation, empowered teams, and career growth pathways.
• Access to modern AI coding assistants and frontier models (examples listed in the posting) as part of the developer productivity toolkit.

Other Notes

• Alloy and related technologies referenced: OpenTelemetry collector, Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo, Pyroscope.
• The role emphasizes collaboration with open source communities and cross-functional stakeholders.