Staff Software Engineer - OpenTelemetry .NET Instrumentation

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, and Tempo – without the overhead of installing, maintaining and scaling their own observability stack

The Observability department is focused on enabling developers to understand the health and performance of their applications and infrastructure in any environment by providing tools to instrument their code, ingest observability data into Grafana Cloud and visualize and explore it.

The OpenTelemetry instrumentation team’s mission is to make sure our users succeed in instrumenting their applications with OpenTelemetry. We are not alone in this. We work closely with the OpenTelemetry SIGs to make OpenTelemetry SDKs and instrumentation libraries a success. Members of the OpenTelemetry instrumentation team are experts in at least one programming language and have a broad knowledge of various other programming languages.

As a company we are remote-first and global, we embrace people of different experiences and backgrounds to build diverse teams where every person brings a unique perspective to the software. We are looking for Engineers that are passionate about communicating with data and providing seamless experiences for our customers to join our growing team! Engineers at Grafana also have the opportunity to contribute to Open Source communities.

Description of Duties

At Grafana Labs, ICs have a dedicated career path and do not have to become managers to progress in their career. Senior Software Engineers at Grafana have a large amount of experience across multiple areas.  They are able to estimate, plan, coordinate and deliver large tasks spanning multiple systems.  They actively coach and mentor other team members in their team and are able to identify and resolve issues with technology and product processes. 

Key Responsibilities

You will bring your software engineering expertise to develop improvements to the .NET SDK and other strategic projects in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

• Collaborate in open-source communities. You will contribute to the OpenTelemetry specification, and to OpenTelemetry components across a wide range of programming languages; Primarily .NET, and with an opportunities to contribute to Python, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, C++, Rust, and more.

• Be visible as an OpenTelemetry expert. Teach others, promote best practices around OpenTelemetry, semantic conventions, and various technologies and frameworks. Both within Grafana Labs and in the broader OpenTelemetry community.

• Support the technical direction and vision of the team, and contribute to business conversations on the OpenTelemetry strategy at Grafana Labs.

• Mentors junior team members in an open and respectful way. Lend your own knowledge and skills to other departments within Grafana, such as our GTM, Product and Support teams. 

As we are remote-first and our engineering organization is largely remote, we provide guidance and meet regularly using video calls, so an independent attitude and good communication skills are a must.

Requirements

Minimum requirements:

• Desire to contribute or experience working in Open Source communities

• Candidates typically have 8+ years of experience in software development with at least one programming language. 

o Experience with the .NET (.NET Framework or .NET v8+) is strongly preferred for this role 

• Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

• Experience with delivering projects from gathering requirements, brainstorming ideas all the way to shipping a product to the customer’s hands in a self-driven way

• Some experience with developing software that runs in the Cloud or some experience with systems engineering

• Familiarity with Observability tooling such as Grafana, Prometheus or OpenTelemetry from a developer’s perspective

Nice to have:

• Experience in a technical leadership role leading project teams and setting technical direction

• Exposure to microservices architecture and distributed systems, or a desire to learn

• Experience contributing to or maintaining open source projects

What you’ll bring to the role

At Grafana Labs, we define senior roles via the scope of their business impact more than via their expertise or their specific activities. So the most important thing we are looking for in an engineer is the ability to take ownership. You will need to drive technical implementations working with the upstream community and contribute to business conversations, helping shape the long-term strategy.

o You have a passion for observability and like to share your knowledge by writing documentation and blog posts.

o You love to engage with customers and help them out.

o You have excellent communication skills.

o You have relevant open source experience, ideally in OpenTelemetry or Prometheus.

o You are willing to become an active member of the OpenTelemetry community.

o You’re curious and you enjoy learning new programming languages and frameworks, setting up examples, and figuring out how things work.

o You have a good understanding of typical production environments. Ideally you have been responsible for operating production services and organizing on-call.

o You actively mentor other team members, identifying areas for focus and improvement.