Senior Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry | US | Remote

Grafana Labs

2d•$154,000 - $193,000•Remote

About The Position

Grafana Labs is seeking a Senior Software Engineer specializing in OpenTelemetry to join their remote-first, global team. This role involves contributing to strategic OpenTelemetry projects, collaborating with upstream open source communities, and defining Grafana Labs' approach to OpenTelemetry adoption. The ideal candidate will combine strong software engineering skills with technical leadership, community engagement, and a customer-focused perspective on observability. This position is suitable for individuals who enjoy building production-quality software, working across teams, and promoting best practices in instrumentation, telemetry pipelines, semantic conventions, and observability architecture. The role offers the opportunity to contribute to open-source communities and work in an innovation-driven environment that values transparency, autonomy, and trust.

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 also 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.
Write software that is reliable, maintainable, and understandable to other engineers.
Comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems and driving them from discovery through delivery.
Experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or systems engineering.
Communicate clearly in writing and in conversation, especially in remote and async environments.
Lead technical work in the open, collaborate with upstream communities, and contribute to Grafana Labs’ long-term OpenTelemetry strategy.
Curious, pragmatic, and comfortable learning new technologies.
Enjoy understanding how systems behave in production, helping customers and colleagues solve difficult problems, and sharing what you learn with others.
Strong written communication, independent execution, and regular collaboration over video and async channels are important.

Nice To Haves

Existing involvement in the OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or the 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.

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.