Staff Product Manager, OpenTelemetry | Germany | Remote

About Product Management: 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.

The opportunity

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.

Your scope will include:

• 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.

What You’ll Be Doing:

• 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

What makes you a great fit:

• 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
• Experience leading strategy and execution across multiple engineering teams or product areas without relying on direct organizational authority
• 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
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical and nontechnical stakeholders in a remote, globally distributed organization

Bonus Points:

• 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

In Germany, the base compensation range for this role is EUR 124,571 - EUR 149,485. 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.

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