Staff Product Manager (OpenTelemetry)

• As a Product Manager at Grafana Labs, you’ll develop a vision and strategy for your product domain. You will own your product’s roadmap, collateral, and market research, and you will collaborate with Grafana leadership on fine-tuning your product’s goals
• You will be the primary advocate and expert in your area, with a strong ability to communicate needs, functionality, and details effectively both to external customers and internal stakeholders
• The teams and people you will be interacting with will be 100% remote and globally distributed, so strong and proactive communication is essential
• Product Managers are the bridge that connect Engineering, Design, and UX to GTM. You are a facilitator who ensures the free flow of information across these teams and are expected to be technically proficient when representing our products to our customers
• As the Staff Product Manager for OpenTelemetry Experience, you’ll own the end-to-end journey for helping people and agents instrument workloads and successfully send useful OpenTelemetry data to Grafana Cloud
• Your mission is to make Grafana Cloud the easiest and most trusted destination for OpenTelemetry workloads. You’ll reduce the uncertainty, complexity, and failure points users encounter between deciding to adopt OpenTelemetry and receiving healthy, correctly attributed, and actionable telemetry in Grafana Cloud
• Teams can instrument workloads, directly or with the help of coding agents, through OpenTelemetry SDKs, automatic instrumentation technologies such as Beyla and SDK injection, or client-side OpenTelemetry Collectors. Each path presents different decisions, deployment requirements, configuration steps, and potential failure modes
• You’ll define a coherent experience that helps users choose the right approach, complete setup successfully, troubleshoot problems, and understand whether their telemetry is healthy and useful
• You’ll design a future in which a growing share of instrumentation work is performed by coding agents acting on behalf of developers. This means treating agents are first-class participants in the experience and ensuring that instrumentation options, configuration requirements, errors, and validation signals are structured, discoverable, and actionable by both humans and machines
• OpenTelemetry SDK onboarding and configuration
• Automatic instrumentation experiences, including OBI/Beyla and SDK injection
• Client-side OpenTelemetry Collector deployment and onboarding
• Collector configuration, authentication, and initial connectivity
• Guidance and machine-readable context that help people and agents choose the right instrumentation approach
• Workflows that allow coding-agents to implement, configure and verify instrumentation safely
• Troubleshooting missing, incomplete, malformed, or unhealthy telemetry
• Validation signals that allow both people and agents to confirm that telemetry is healthy, correctly attributed, and usable in Grafana Cloud
• The transition from receiving telemetry to activating the appropriate Grafana Cloud observability solution
• Success does not stop when Grafana Cloud receives the first data point. Telemetry must arrive with the quality, context, and structure required to support meaningful observability outcomes
• You’ll partner closely with teams responsible for experiences such as Application Observability, Kubernetes Monitoring, Infrastructure Observability, and Drilldown Apps to ensure OpenTelemetry workloads receive a first-class experience from initial setup through first value
• This is a horizontal Staff-level product leadership role spanning multiple products and engineering teams. You may not directly own every SDK, collector, instrumentation technology, or downstream application involved in the journey. You will, however, be accountable for the coherence of the overall customer experience, its success measures, and the cross-product strategy required to improve it
• AI will also be part of how you work, not only what you build. You’ll be expected to use AI tools regularly to accelerate customer-research synthesis, analyze product signals, explore technical workflows, prototype experiences, develop positioning content, and test agent-led instrumentation journeys. You’ll model thoughtful, hands-on adoption of AI while applying strong judgement to its outputs
• The role is not focused on developing OpenTelemetry as an open source project in isolation. You’ll engage with and contribute to the OpenTelemetry ecosystem where appropriate, while measuring success through customer activation and outcomes in Grafana Cloud
• Define the vision, strategy, and cross-product roadmap for the journey from an uninstrumented workload to healthy, useful telemetry in Grafana Cloud solutions
• Create coherent, opinionated experiences that help users choose and implement the right approach across SDK instrumentation, automatic instrumentation, and Collector-based deployment while preserving the flexibility advanced users require
• Identify and eliminate the leading causes of setup failure, abandonment, misconfiguration, and low-quality telemetry
• Establish shared experience principles, priorities, and success criteria across the product and engineering teams contributing to the OpenTelemetry journey
• Use customer research, product data, and market insight to prioritize investments and measure outcomes such as onboarding completion, time to useful telemetry, telemetry health, and workload expansion
• Partner with downstream Grafana Cloud solution teams to create a coherent transition from telemetry ingestion to meaningful product activation
• Extend beyond product delivery to how the OpenTelemetry experience is positioned and brought to market. In partnership with Product Marketing and go-to-market teams, you’ll help define the product narrative, sharpen out differentiation, and develop launches, technical content, adoption programs, and campaigns that create demand and accelerate customer activation
• Collaborate with Engineering, Design, Documentation, Developer Relations, Product Marketing, and go-to-market teams to deliver and communicate a differentiated OpenTelemetry experience
• Represent Grafana Labs and its customers in relevant OpenTelemetry ecosystem discussions

Benefits

• Vacation: Balance is key. Our team enjoys 30 days of paid vacation each year on top of national holidays, parental leave, and sick leave. We also take a breather on a number of Grafana Shutdown Days each year
• Healthcare: We’re proud to provide health coverage or stipends for our colleagues in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore, and India
• Retirement planning: There’s no time like the present to start saving for your future. We make employer contributions into the pension pots of our team members in the US, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany
• Professional development: On top of a $1,500 annual learning and development stipend, Grafanistas have thousands of on-demand courses at their fingertips to help them grow professionally. Want to attend a conference or training? Go ahead. Just pass on what you learned
• Work location: Vast majority of our roles are fully remote, focused on hiring the best talent and allowing you to perform from the comfort of your home. If you fancy a change of scene, we’ll also reimburse you up to $175 a month for a personal co-working space
• Choice of tech: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to the tech required to do your job. Choose the laptop and accessories you need when you join us, and we’ll refresh them every three years
• Mindfulness: When you join the team, you can sign up for a complimentary subscription to Headspace to take advantage of the benefits of mindfulness and meditation. Our wellbeing resource group also organize sessions run by fellow Grafanistas or external trainers
• Global Employee Assistance Program: We offer all team members a 100% confidential support service with 24/7 365 access to professionally qualified counsellors and specialists
• Paid parental leave: Grafana offers paid parental leave to all eligible new parents. This offers Grafanistas time to bond with and care for their children in the first year after birth or adoption- Experience leading strategy and execution across multiple engineering teams or product areas without relying on direct organizational authority
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and nontechnical stakeholders in a remote, globally distributed organization
• 5+ years of Product Management experience, with a strong track record in developer tools, observability, infrastructure, data platforms, or another technically complex B2B product domain
• Strong working knowledge of OpenTelemetry, including SDK instrumentation, OTLP, Collector pipelines, telemetry context, and semantic conventions
• Experience using or building instrumentation systems, agents, telemetry collectors, configuration products, or related infrastructure
• An understanding of the challenges involved in deploying and operating software across Kubernetes, virtual machines, and public cloud environments
• Experience turning complex onboarding, configuration, and troubleshooting workflows into clear and approachable product experiences
• A history of using customer research and product data to make decisions, align stakeholders, and deliver measurable outcomes
• Experience contributing to or building products around the OpenTelemetry or broader open source observability ecosystem
• Experience with automatic instrumentation, eBPF, or runtime-based instrumentation
• Firsthand experience as an SRE, platform engineer, developer, or observability practitioner
• Experience building product-led onboarding, configuration-validation, or telemetry-health experiences at scale