Senior Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry | US | Remote

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo).

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 United States or Canada.

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.

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.

• 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 (Golang, Rust, or Java 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.
• 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 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.

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.

Why You'll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture
• Scaling Organization
• Transparent Communication
• Innovation-Driven
• Open Source Roots
• Empowered Teams
• Career Growth Pathways
• Approachable Leadership
• Passionate People
• In-Person onboarding
• Balance is Key (30 days annual leave)

Grafana Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer.