Observability Engineer1

Role Description – Observability Engineer (OpenTelemetry, eBPF, Java)

Engagement overview

We are looking for a senior engineer to move workloads from a commercial APM solution to vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry instrumentation with Grafana Cloud as the backend.

Detail

Location

Austria

Work model

Remote, with occasional on-site presence in Austria

Residence

Within the EU

Languages

German and/or English: business fluent, min. B2

Seniority

Min. 5 years of professional experience in platform engineering, including proven hands-on experience with tracing or APM instrumentation

Project start

ASAP

Duration

Short- or long-term engagement possible

The role

The project modernises observability for a large, heterogeneous enterprise landscape: container platforms, virtual machines and integration middleware. The focus is on OpenTelemetry, eBPF-based auto-instrumentation and a GitOps-driven rollout. The role can be filled in one of two orientations.

Profile A – Platform Engineer (OpenTelemetry & eBPF)

Focus: Run instrumentation reliably and at scale on container platforms and Linux hosts.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate telemetry pipelines (collectors, gateways) to Grafana Cloud / Tempo
• Deploy instrumentation based on Open Telemetry and eBPF
• Automate rollouts across environments with GitOps

Requirements

• Application Server: working knowledge of common Java application servers and their start mechanisms, e.g. JBoss, Tomcat
• JDK 8/11: solid understanding of Java agents and JVM startup options
• Grafana: expert in Grafana Cloud, Tempo, Alloy, Beyla
• OpenTelemetry: expert in Collector, Operator and context propagation
• eBPF: hands-on with eBPF-based instrumentation (e.g. Grafana Beyla), including Linux capabilities and security settings
• OpenShift: deep knowledge of the OpenShift security model and operators
• GitOps: CI/CD and configuration management

Profile B – Java Specialist (OpenTelemetry & eBPF)

Focus: Get deep, meaningful telemetry out of applications where auto-instrumentation is not enough.

Responsibilities

• Assess applications for compatibility with the available instrumentation options
• Develop OpenTelemetry agent extensions and custom instrumentation
• Ensure end-to-end trace context across synchronous and asynchronous communication
• Provide reusable instrumentation templates for application teams

Requirements

• Application Server: expert in Tomcat, WildFly, WebLogic and integration middleware
• JDK: expert across Java versions 8/11, including bytecode instrumentation
• Grafana: solid in Tempo, dashboards and profiling
• OpenTelemetry: expert in the Java agent, SDK, extensions and manual instrumentation (Java, .NET a plus)
• eBPF: good understanding of the strengths and limits of eBPF compared to in-process agents
• OpenShift: working knowledge of deploying and instrumenting workloads
• GitOps: working knowledge of Argo CD and CI/CD pipelines

Common requirements

• Production experience with OpenTelemetry and Grafana at large scale
• Judgment to choose the right instrumentation approach per application
• Experience with performance and overhead testing
• Nice to have: migration from a commercial APM solution to OpenTelemetry