Staff Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry Python instrumentation | Germany | Remote

Grafana Cloud is Grafana Labs' composable observability platform integrating metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The OpenTelemetry SDKs team helps users instrument their software with OpenTelemetry and works closely with the OpenTelemetry SIGs. In this remote role, the Staff Software Engineer will focus on a language-specific implementation of OpenTelemetry in Python, with an emphasis on OpenTelemetry for Generative AI, using an upstream-first approach.

Responsibilities

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, connecting 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 using profiling and benchmarks, making tradeoffs around runtime overhead, compatibility, and maintainability; Be visible as an OpenTelemetry expert by teaching others and promoting best practices within Grafana Labs and the broader OpenTelemetry community; Support the technical direction and vision of the team and contribute to business conversations on OpenTelemetry strategy; Own projects from an ambiguous problem through design, implementation, testing, documentation, and release; Partner with GTM, Product and Support teams, join customer conversations, investigate instrumentation issues, and turn findings into fixes and practical guidance

Requirements

8+ years of experience in software development; strong proficiency in Python; experience debugging production software, language internals, libraries, and asynchronous code; interest in AI applications and agent systems; experience working in open-source communities; familiarity with observability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry; experience with cloud-based software or systems engineering

Nice to have

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

Benefits

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs); 100% remote work; In-person onboarding; 30 days annual leave per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days; Career growth pathways; Dedicated individual contributor career path