Senior Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry

Details

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source company building observability tooling used by millions. The Observability department focuses on enabling developers to understand application and infrastructure health by providing tools to instrument code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud, and visualize and explore it. This role contributes to Grafana Labs' work in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem and involves technical leadership, community collaboration, and building production-quality software.

This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the United States or Canada.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to OpenTelemetry components and related open source projects across the ecosystem.
• Help define and execute Grafana Labs’ technical strategy for OpenTelemetry.
• Collaborate with upstream maintainers, contributors, and users in open source communities.
• Serve as an OpenTelemetry expert within Grafana Labs and externally, promoting best practices around instrumentation, semantic conventions, and telemetry collection.
• Build clean, robust, performant software that can be maintained and extended by others.
• Partner with Product, Support, GTM, and other engineering teams to connect customer needs with technical direction.
• Mentor engineers across levels through design reviews, code reviews, technical guidance, and open collaboration.
• Write documentation, examples, blog posts, or other technical materials that help users and internal teams understand OpenTelemetry.

Requirements

• Strong experience with at least one systems or backend programming language. Experience with Golang, Rust, or Java is strongly preferred. Experience with C/C++ or similar languages can translate well.
• Experience with, or a strong desire to contribute to, open source communities.
• Experience working with observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or similar technologies from a developer’s perspective.
• Ability to write reliable, maintainable software and take ownership of ambiguous technical problems from discovery through delivery.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or systems engineering.
• Clear written and verbal communication, especially in remote and asynchronous environments.

Bonus Points

• Existing involvement in the OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or broader observability ecosystem.
• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects.
• Experience setting technical direction for a project or team.
• Experience with microservices, telemetry pipelines, distributed tracing, metrics, logs, or production debugging.
• Experience operating production services, participating in on-call, or improving reliability for customer-facing systems.
• Experience creating technical content such as documentation, examples, tutorials, or blog posts.

Compensation & Rewards

• In the United States, the base compensation range for this role is USD 154,000 - USD 193,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits listed by Grafana Labs.

About the Company & Culture

• Remote-first, open-source roots, and emphasis on transparency, autonomy, and trust.
• Opportunity to contribute to open source and collaborate across a global organization.
• In-person onboarding and a global annual leave policy (30 days per annum, with 3 reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days).

Equal Opportunity

Grafana Labs states it will recruit, train, compensate and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and other characteristics. The company may utilize AI tools in recruitment to assist matching CVs to job postings.