Engineering Manager - Observability

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, a fully managed observability platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations. Built on open source and open standards, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability, providing unified visibility across disparate data. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries.

We’re scaling fast, staying true to our open-source legacy, global collaborative culture, and 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 Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – without the overhead of installing, maintaining, and scaling their own observability stack.

The Observability department focuses on enabling developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure by providing tools to instrument code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud, and visualize/explore it.

What is the Ingest Team?

We build and maintain the configuration and deployment tooling that bridges the gap between "I want observability" and "I have observability." To achieve this, the team owns Fleet Management, the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart, and the Instrumentation Hub. Fleet Management is the cloud-based central control plane customers use to manage hundreds of thousands of Observability Collectors. The Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart effectively deploys Observability Collection in Kubernetes environments. The Instrumentation Hub seamlessly combines these to achieve a magic 1-command instrumentation experience.

What You'll Be Doing

• Manage and develop a team of backend and frontend engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting individual growth through career conversations. This is a remote team, distributed between EMEA and NASA.
• Collaborate closely with go-to-market teams to ensure customers and prospects are successful with their Observability collection journey.
• Work closely with product and engineering leadership to ensure Fleet Management, the Kubernetes Helm Chart, and the Instrumentation Hub fit seamlessly into the end-to-end user experience for Grafana Cloud products.
• Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from early ideation through planning, execution, and post-launch, guiding the team to deliver high-quality results consistently.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment, and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.

As a company, we are remote-first and global, embracing people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a new perspective to the software.

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. 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-6 Astra, Claude Opus 5, Gemini 3.8).

What Makes You a Great Fit

• Experience in either Observability (especially OpenTelemetry) or building a central control plane that manages fleets of collectors is a strong advantage.
• Comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision-making, be it technical or product-focused.
• Adept at managing relationships while staying up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts to maintain and enhance your understanding of the challenges your teams face.
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
• Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and real-world impact.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling. We expect you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

• 100% Remote, Global Culture – We bring together talent from around the world, united by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization – Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, ever-evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication – Expect open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven – Autonomy and support to ship great work and try new things.
• Open Source Roots – Built on community-driven values that shape how we work.
• Empowered Teams – High trust, low ego culture that values outcomes over optics.
• Career Growth Pathways – Defined opportunities to grow and develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership – Transparent execs who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People – Join a team of smart, supportive folks who care deeply about what they do.
• In-Person Onboarding – We want you to thrive from day 1 with your fellow new ‘Grafanistas’ to learn all about what we do and how we do it.
• Balance is Key – We operate a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum. 3 days of your annual leave entitlement are reserved for Grafana Shutdown Days to allow the team to really disconnect.