Staff Python Engineer - OpenTelemetry & AI at Grafana Labs

Grafana; United States; Remote; USD 126,000 - 157,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSUs

Remote work

Open source culture

30 days annual leave

Job summary

Grafana Labs, a remote-first observability company, seeks a Staff Python Engineer to advance the OpenTelemetry Python SDK and instrumentation with a focus on Generative AI. You will contribute upstream and bring innovations to Grafana Cloud, collaborating with OpenTelemetry communities and Grafana teams worldwide.

The role emphasizes deep Python expertise, AI instrumentations, and upstream-first development while maintaining strong autonomy in a remote, high-trust culture.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python and debugging production software, language internals, libraries, and asynchronous code.
• Experience contributing to Open Source communities and OpenTelemetry ecosystem.
• Interest in AI applications and agent systems, with curiosity about instrumentation and troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate in open-source communities by developing and maintaining the OpenTelemetry Python SDK and instrumentation libraries.
• Build Python instrumentation for AI agents and generative AI workflows, including asynchronous code handling.
• Improve Python SDK performance using profiling and benchmarking; balance runtime overhead and maintainability.
• Promote OpenTelemetry best practices and share knowledge within Grafana Labs and the wider community.
• Contribute to OpenTelemetry strategy at Grafana and own projects from design to release.
• Partner with GTM, Product, and Support teams to turn learnings into practical guidance.

Skills

OpenTelemetry

Python

Async programming

AI / Generative AI

Open source

Performance optimization

Observability tooling

Tools

OpenTelemetry SDK

Python

Asyncio

Job description

Staff Python Engineer - OpenTelemetry & AI at Grafana Labs — Remote

A rare Staff-level IC role in a high-growth observability company — Grafana Labs explicitly maintains a dedicated IC career track, meaning you can progress to Principal and beyond without moving into management. This is a genuine green flag for engineers who want depth over hierarchy.

Compensation benchmarking: The €113k–€141k German range is competitive for a Staff Engineer in Western Europe, where market rates typically sit between €100k–€150k at this level. RSUs add meaningful equity upside, especially given Grafana's strong VC backing (Sequoia, Lightspeed, CapitalG) and growth trajectory toward a likely IPO.

Skills you'll develop and their market value:

• OpenTelemetry expertise — OTel is rapidly becoming the industry standard for observability instrumentation. Deep SDK-level knowledge is rare and highly sought after.
• AI/GenAI observability — Instrumenting AI agents and LLM workflows is an emerging, underserved specialization with very few practitioners today. Early movers here have outsized career leverage.
• Open-source maintainership — Public OSS contributions are a career differentiator, building external reputation alongside technical depth.
• Python internals & async patterns — Advanced Python proficiency at the SDK/runtime level is transferable to any company running Python in production.

Culture signals: High autonomy, transparent leadership, and a trust-based async culture suggest a mature remote-first setup — not performative. The 30-day PTO policy and shutdown days signal genuine respect for work-life balance. The open-source ethos means your work is visible to the broader tech community, compounding your professional reputation over time.

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Learn more at grafana.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X .

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 opportunity and we would be interested in applications from Germany, UK, Ireland and Spain.

The Opportunity:

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 SDKs team's mission is to make sure our users succeed in instrumenting their software with OpenTelemetry. We work closely with the OpenTelemetry SIGs to make OpenTelemetry SDKs and instrumentation libraries a success. Members of this team are experts in at least one programming language and have a broad knowledge of various other programming languages.

In this role, you will focus on a language-specific implementation of OpenTelemetry in Python , with an emphasis on OpenTelemetry for Generative AI . You will get to work in an upstream-first approach, helping accelerate the OpenTelemetry project while bringing the innovations to Grafana Labs products and offerings.

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.

At Grafana Labs, ICs have a dedicated career path and do not have to become managers to progress in their career. Staff Software Engineers at Grafana have a large amount of experience across multiple areas. They are able to estimate, plan, coordinate and deliver large tasks spanning multiple systems. They actively coach and mentor other team members in their team and are able to identify and resolve issues with technology and product processes.

What You'll Be Doing:

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

• Collaborate in open-source communities. You will develop and maintain the OpenTelemetry Python SDK and instrumentation libraries, working with maintainers and other vendors on specifications, APIs, and implementation decisions.
• Build Python instrumentation for AI agents. Build instrumentation that connects agent runs, model calls, and tool execution, including across asynchronous code. Contribute to evolving OpenTelemetry conventions for generative AI, with care for sensitive data and metric cardinality.
• Improve Python SDK performance. Use profiling and benchmarks to evaluate implementation approaches with the upstream community. Make sound tradeoffs around 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 in the broader OpenTelemetry community.
• Support technical direction and vision. Contribute to business conversations on the OpenTelemetry strategy at Grafana Labs. Own projects from an ambiguous problem through design, implementation, testing, documentation, and release.
• Partner in an open and respectful way. Lend your knowledge and skills to our GTM, Product and Support teams. Join customer conversations, investigate instrumentation issues, and turn what you learn into fixes and practical guidance.

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

What Makes You a Great Fit:

At Grafana Labs, Staff Engineers are defined by the impact they have and the people they enable. You 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. You are eager to become an active member of the OpenTelemetry community, collaborate with maintainers and users, and keep learning 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 Germany, the compensation range for this role is EUR 113,000 ­– EUR 141,000. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed throughout the interview process. All of our roles include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), giving every team member ownership in Grafana Labs' success. We believe in shared outcomes — RSUs help us stay aligned and invested as we scale globally.

*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.*

Why You'll Thrive at Grafana Labs:

• 100% Remote, Global Culture – As a remote-only company, 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. *We will comply with local legislation where applicable.*

Equal Opportunity Employer: Grafana Labs is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, colour, nationality, origin, caste, sex, gender reassignment identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, religion or belief, disability, veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, maternity, marital, family or carer status, or any other characteristic which is protected by local law. We believe that equality and diversity build a strong organisation, and we work hard to ensure that is the foundation of our organisation as we grow.

Grafana Labs may utilize AI tools in its recruitment process to assist in matching information provided in CVs to job postings. The recruitment team will continue to review inbound CVs manually to identify alignment with current openings.

For information about how your personal data is used once you've applied to a job, check out its privacy policy.

Which countries are eligible for this remote role at Grafana Labs? Grafana Labs is accepting applications from candidates based in Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain for this remote position. What is the salary range for this Staff Software Engineer role? In Germany, the compensation range is €113,000 to €141,000 per year. Compensation in other eligible countries may vary and will be discussed by the recruiter at the start of the process. All roles also include Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). Is this role fully remote or does it require office attendance? The role is 100% remote. Grafana Labs is a remote-first company with team members across 40+ countries. Regular collaboration happens via video calls, and there is an in-person onboarding experience for new hires. Do I need prior experience building AI systems to apply? No. The job posting states that prior experience building AI systems is "helpful, but not required." An interest in AI applications and agent systems, plus curiosity about instrumenting them, is what matters most. What is the PTO policy at Grafana Labs? Grafana Labs offers 30 days of annual leave globally, with 3 of those days reserved as company-wide Shutdown Days to ensure the entire team can fully disconnect. Local legislation is respected where applicable.

Remote work & career advice that actually works.