Staff Product Manager, OpenTelemetry | Germany | Remote

Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale. With Grafana Cloud's actually useful AI, organizations can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data to move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 35 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,600+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re 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 fully remote position and we're considering candidates in Germany.

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.