Senior Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry

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 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. Bo