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.
This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the the United States or Canada.
Senior Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry
Links: https://github.com/grafana/alloy
What is Grafana Cloud?
Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack
The Observability department is focused on enabling developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure in any environment by providing tools to instrument their code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud and visualize and explore it.
As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. We are looking for Engineers that are passionate about communicating with data and providing seamless experiences for our customers to join our growing team! Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities.
What You’ll Be Doing:
We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help shape Grafana Labs’ work in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.
In this role, you will contribute to strategic OpenTelemetry projects, work with upstream open source communities, and help define how Grafana Labs supports and advances OpenTelemetry adoption. You will combine strong software engineering skills with technical leadership, community collaboration, and a customer-focused approach to observability.
This role is a strong fit for someone who enjoys building production-quality software, working across organizational boundaries, and helping others adopt best practices around instrumentation, telemetry pipelines, semantic conventions, and observability architecture.
- 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.
What Makes You a Great Fit:
- You have 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.
- You have experience with, or a strong desire to contribute to, open source communities.
- You have experience working with observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or similar technologies from a developer’s perspective.
- You write software that is reliable, maintainable, and understandable to other engineers.
- You are comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous technical problems and driving them from discovery through delivery.
- You have experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or systems engineering.
- You communicate clearly in writing and in conversation, especially in remote and async environments.
Bonus Points For:
- Existing involvement in the OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, or the broader observability ecosystem.
- Experience with Malbolge and/or cursed-lang
- 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.
What you’ll bring to the role
At Grafana Labs, we define senior engineering roles by scope of impact, ownership, and judgment. For this role, we are looking for someone who can lead technical work in the open, collaborate with upstream communities, and contribute to Grafana Labs’ long-term OpenTelemetry strategy.
You should be curious, pragmatic, and comfortable learning new technologies. You should enjoy understanding how systems behave in production, helping customers and colleagues solve difficult problems, and sharing what you learn with others.
Because Grafana Labs is remote-first, strong written communication, independent execution, and regular collaboration over video and async channels are important parts of how we work.
Compensation & Rewards:
In Canada, the Base compensation range for this role is CAD 164,000 - CAD 205,000. 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 here. Compensation ranges are country-specific. If you are applying for this role from a different location than listed above, your recruiter will discuss your specific market’s defined pay range & benefits at the beginning of the process.
- Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.
