Principal Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry Instrumentation (Remote, UK)

Grafana Labs; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 96,000 - 121,000; Full time

Job summary

A global software company is looking for a Principal Software Engineer specializing in OpenTelemetry Instrumentation. In this remote role, you will lead technical direction, promote best practices, and engage with the OpenTelemetry community. The ideal candidate has strong communication skills, a passion for observability, and experience in mentoring. This position offers a competitive salary, ranging from £96,124 to £120,156, plus benefits.

Benefits

Equity

Bonus (if applicable)

Other benefits

Qualifications

• Ability to take ownership and drive technical and business conversations.
• Strong communication skills and experience in mentoring.
• Passion for observability and experience in OpenTelemetry or Prometheus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical direction of the team and drive OpenTelemetry strategy.
• Promote best practices and engage with the OpenTelemetry community.
• Mentor team members and help them improve.

Skills

Communication skills

Ownership and leadership

Open source experience

Curiosity and eagerness to learn

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Job description

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Principal Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry Instrumentation (Remote, UK), united kingdom (remote)

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Job Reference:

e70235117f8c

Job Views:

23

Posted:

12.08.2025

Expiry Date:

26.09.2025

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Job Description:

Principal Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry Instrumentation

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.

The OpenTelemetry instrumentation team’s mission is to make sure our users succeed in instrumenting their applications with OpenTelemetry. We are not alone in this. We work closely with the OpenTelemetry SIGs to make OpenTelemetry SDKs and instrumentation libraries a success. Members of the OpenTelemetry instrumentation team are experts in at least one programming language and have a broad knowledge of various other programming languages.

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 will you be doing?

At Grafana Labs, ICs have a dedicated career path and do not have to become managers to progress in their career. Principal software engineer is a leadership role for ICs. You are expected to have director-level scope, but with technical depth.

• Support and lead the technical direction of the team, and drive business conversations on the OpenTelemetry strategy at Grafana Labs.
• 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 in the broader OpenTelemetry community.

As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

What are we looking for in you?

• At Grafana Labs, we define senior roles via the scope of their business impact more than via their expertise or their specific activities. So the most important thing we are looking for in a principal engineer is the ability to take ownership, and drive both technical and business conversations on a director-level scope.
• You have a passion for observability and like to share your knowledge by writing documentation and blog posts.
• You love to engage with customers and help them out.
• You have excellent communication skills.
• You have relevant open source experience, ideally in OpenTelemetry or Prometheus.
• You are willing to become an active member of the OpenTelemetry community.
• You’re curious and you enjoy learning new programming languages and frameworks, setting up examples, and figuring out how things work.
• You have a good understanding of typical production environments. Ideally you have been responsible for operating production services and organizing on-call.
• You actively mentor other team members, identifying areas for focus and improvement.

In the UK, the base compensation range for this role is £96,124 - £120,156. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable) and other benefits listed.

*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