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 integrates AI to observability, providing unified visibility across disparate data. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors.

We are scaling fast, maintaining our open-source legacy, global collaborative culture, and passion for meaningful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment fueled by transparency, autonomy, and trust.

This is a remote opportunity, and we are interested in applications from Germany, UK, Ireland, and Spain.

The Opportunity

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform, integrating metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows customers to leverage the best open-source observability software like Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo without the overhead of self-managing their stack.

The Observability department focuses on enabling developers to understand application and infrastructure health by providing tools for code instrumentation, data ingestion into Grafana Cloud, and visualization/exploration.

The OpenTelemetry SDKs team ensures users succeed in instrumenting their software with OpenTelemetry. We collaborate closely with OpenTelemetry SIGs to advance SDKs and instrumentation libraries. Team members are experts in at least one programming language with broad knowledge of others.

In this role, you will focus on the OpenTelemetry Python implementation, with an emphasis on OpenTelemetry for Generative AI. You will work with an upstream-first approach, accelerating the OpenTelemetry project while bringing innovations to Grafana Labs products.

As a remote-first and global company, we embrace diverse experiences and backgrounds. We seek Engineers passionate about communicating with data and providing seamless customer experiences. Engineers at Grafana also contribute to Open Source communities.

At Grafana Labs, Individual Contributors (ICs) have a dedicated career path, not requiring management roles for progression. Staff Software Engineers possess extensive experience across multiple areas, capable of estimating, planning, coordinating, and delivering large, multi-system tasks. They actively coach and mentor team members and resolve technology and product process issues.

What You’ll Be Doing

You will apply your software engineering expertise to develop improvements for the OpenTelemetry Python SDK and instrumentation libraries, with a strong focus on AI applications and agent workflows. This is a hands-on role requiring deep Python expertise and an interest in AI.

Collaborate in open-source communities: Develop and maintain the OpenTelemetry Python SDK and instrumentation libraries, working with maintainers and vendors on specifications, APIs, and implementation decisions.
Build Python instrumentation for AI agents: Create instrumentation that connects agent runs, model calls, and tool execution, including across asynchronous code. Contribute to evolving OpenTelemetry conventions for generative AI, considering sensitive data and metric cardinality.
Improve Python SDK performance: Use profiling and benchmarks to evaluate implementation approaches with the upstream community. Make sound tradeoffs regarding runtime overhead, compatibility, and maintainability.
Be visible as an OpenTelemetry expert: Teach others, promote best practices around OpenTelemetry, semantic conventions, and various technologies and frameworks, both within Grafana Labs and the broader OpenTelemetry community.
Support technical direction and vision: Contribute to business conversations on OpenTelemetry strategy at Grafana Labs. Own projects from ambiguous problem definition through design, implementation, testing, documentation, and release.
Partner openly and respectfully: Lend your knowledge and skills to our Go-To-Market, Product, and Support teams. Join customer conversations, investigate instrumentation issues, and translate learnings into fixes and practical guidance.

As a remote-first organization, we provide guidance and meet regularly via video calls, so high agency and good communication skills are essential.

What Makes You a Great Fit

Staff Engineers at Grafana Labs are defined by their impact and their ability to enable others. You will take ownership of complex problems, set technical direction, and help others deliver improvements that matter to customers and the OpenTelemetry community.

8+ years of experience in software development, with strong proficiency in Python and experience debugging production software, language internals, libraries, and asynchronous code.
An interest in AI applications and agent systems, and curiosity about how to instrument and troubleshoot them. Prior experience building AI systems is helpful, but not required.
Experience working in open-source communities. Eager to become an active member of the OpenTelemetry community, collaborate with maintainers and users, and continuously learn across languages, frameworks, and the wider observability ecosystem.
Familiarity with observability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry, alongside experience with cloud-based software or systems engineering. You understand production environments and can assess operational risks.

Bonus Points For

Experience working on open-source observability projects, ideally in OpenTelemetry or Prometheus.
Experience in Python instrumentation techniques, profiling, runtime diagnostics, or asynchronous context propagation.
Experience in a hands-on technical leadership role, setting technical direction and leading project teams.
Experience instrumenting AI frameworks or agent workflows, or working with OpenTelemetry semantic conventions for generative AI.
Experience contributing to or maintaining Open Source projects, with evidence of successful pull requests and community collaboration.
Rust experience is a plus for exploring potential Python SDK performance improvements, including Rust-backed implementations.

Compensation & Rewards

In Ireland, the compensation range for this role is EUR 121,000 - EUR 151,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset. All roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), providing team members with ownership in Grafana Labs' success.

Why You’ll Thrive at Grafana Labs

100% Remote, Global Culture: Talent from around the world, united by collaboration and shared purpose.
Scaling Organization: Tackle meaningful work in a high-growth, evolving environment.
Transparent Communication: 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.
Empowered Teams: High trust, low ego culture valuing outcomes over optics.
Career Growth Pathways: Defined opportunities for career development.
Approachable Leadership: Transparent, involved, visible, and human executives.
Passionate People: Join a team of smart, supportive folks dedicated to their work.
In-Person Onboarding: Thrive from day one with fellow new 'Grafanistas' to learn about our work and culture.
Balance is Key: Global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days for team disconnection.