Staff Mobile Engineer: Instrumentation SDK (iOS/Android) - Observability

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. The Opportunity: Grafana Observability builds end-to-end observability that spans application, infrastructure, database, browser, and mobile. Our Mobile Observability initiative gives mobile developers first-class instrumentation SDKs that capture traces, metrics, logs, crashes, and user sessions. Our solutions aim to be tightly integrated with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Cloud. We're building high-performance, low-overhead SDKs that make it easy for teams to connect mobile signals to backend and infra telemetry for true full-stack visibility. We value open standards, great developer experience, and doing the hard engineering needed to ship reliable software at scale. You may not meet every requirement below. If this role excites you, please raise your hand. What You'll Be Doing: • Build and evolve mobile instrumentation SDKs for iOS (Swift / Obj-C) and Android (Kotlin / Java), prioritizing performance, stability, and a great developer experience. • Design and ship SDK features such as session tracking, crash reporting, sampling strategies, automatic context propagation, and OpenTelemetry integrations. • Own projects end-to-end. • Break large, ambiguous problems into incremental deliverables: design modular solutions, ship MVPs, gather feedback, iterate quickly. • Ensure quality: automated tests, CI, documentation, and smooth, backwards-compatible upgrade paths. • Collaborate cross-functionally with backend, frontend, product, and solutions engineering to ensure cohesive end-to-end observability workflows. • Engage with the open-source community: review PRs, discuss design proposals, and help guide external contributors. • Mentor teammates, participate in technical design discussions and help shape the mobile observability roadmap. We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro). What Makes You a Great Fit: • You're a motivated self-starter with a bias toward action and the ability to run with poorly defined scopes. You can operate autonomously while being highly collaborative. • Strong mobile engineering experience (one or both): iOS (Swift/Obj-C) and/or Android (Kotlin/Java). • Demonstrated experience building or maintaining mobile SDKs, platform libraries, or other developer-facing platform code used by external developers. • Experience working with performance-sensitive code (startup time, memory, network efficiency) and making pragmatic tradeoffs. • Familiarity with OpenTelemetry (instrumentation, SDKs, collectors) or experience contributing to/maintaining OTel SDKs or similar telemetry libraries. • Excellent written and verbal communication • Comfortable working in a fully remote, globally distributed team. • Coachable, customer-focused, and passionate about developer experience, you can do more than code: you write docs, mentor others, and shape roadmaps. • Pragmatic and comfortable navigating ambiguity: you prioritize progress over perfection and iterate quickly based on feedback. Bonus Points For: • Contributions to OpenTelemetry, crash reporting libraries, or other observability OSS. • Experience with cross-platform frameworks (React Native, Flutter) or building native bindings/bridges. • Experience with mobile security, privacy, or platform integration challenges. • Prior work on crash aggregation, session replay, or samplin