Engineering Manager - Adaptive Telemetry

Engineering Manager - Adaptive Telemetry at Grafana Labs

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. With over 20 million users globally, Grafana is the leading open-source visualization tool, monitoring diverse applications from beehives to climate change. Our instantly recognizable dashboards are used by major organizations worldwide. Grafana Labs also supports more than 3,000 companies, including Bloomberg and JPMorgan Chase, in managing their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack. This stack, featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo), can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with Grafana Enterprise Stack.

We are rapidly scaling while maintaining our core values: an open-source legacy, a global collaborative culture, and a passion for impactful work. Our team thrives in an innovation-driven environment where transparency, autonomy, and trust are paramount. We encourage all interested candidates to apply, even if they don't meet every single requirement, as this could be a career-defining opportunity.

This is a remote position, and we are specifically looking for candidates in United States time zones.

About Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud is our comprehensive observability platform, seamlessly integrating metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It empowers our customers to leverage best-in-class open-source observability software—including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope—without the complexities of installation, maintenance, and scaling their own observability stack.

The Databases department is responsible for owning and operating the telemetry databases: Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Pyroscope for profiles. We deliver these databases as a robust Cloud service supporting Grafana Cloud.

The Opportunity: Adaptive Telemetry Group

The Adaptive Telemetry group, a vital part of the Databases department, is dedicated to ensuring that all telemetry stored in our databases is truly valuable and actionable. Under this mission, the group is at the forefront of developing Adaptive Metrics, Adaptive Logs, Adaptive Traces, and Adaptive Profiles.

Our Adaptive Telemetry solutions provide users with sophisticated control and optimization capabilities for their telemetry data. These solutions intelligently ensure that data storage is optimized based on individual usage patterns, guaranteeing that only the most valuable data is retained for analysis and insight.

As a remote-first and global company, we actively embrace individuals from diverse experiences and backgrounds, fostering teams where every person contributes a unique perspective to our software development.

What You'll Be Doing

• Manage and develop a team of engineers, providing consistent feedback and supporting individual career growth through dedicated conversations.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering leadership to define goals that advance the Adaptive Telemetry group and align with broader business objectives.
• Provide comprehensive guidance throughout the project lifecycle, from initial ideation through planning, execution, and post-launch, ensuring the team consistently delivers high-quality results.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers are encouraged to learn, experiment, and iterate quickly, cultivating a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
• Work effectively across team boundaries, contributing to projects outside your immediate team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve critical customer problems.

We are deeply committed to enhancing developer productivity. You will have the opportunity to utilize modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (with your choice of tools, within security guidelines), supported by a company-funded usage budget to enable rapid iteration without unnecessary friction.

We champion pragmatic AI-assisted development for faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always coupled with rigorous code review and stringent quality standards.

You'll also gain access to frontier models, including GPT-Codex 5/3, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3 Pro.

What We're Looking For In You

• A motivated self-starter with a strong bias toward action and ownership, adept at navigating ambiguity and driving work forward in complex problem spaces.
• Comfortable collaborating across diverse time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, utilizing clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety.
• Experienced in guiding and supporting other engineers, leading initiatives or small teams, and collaborating effectively to ensure successful project outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align diverse stakeholders, and elevate team performance to consistently deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
• Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and their real-world impact.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems principles, including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and observability.
• Comfort with AI-assisted tooling; we embrace AI and agentic development, so we expect curiosity and comfort in using AI-powered tools, ideally with practical experience integrating them into a team’s workflow.

Compensation & Rewards

In the United States, the Base compensation range for this role is USD 183,858 - USD 220,630. Actual compensation may vary based on level, experience, and skillset as assessed in the interview process. Benefits include equity, bonus (if applicable), and other benefits listed here.

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 unite talent from across the globe, bound by a culture of collaboration and shared purpose.
• Scaling Organization: Engage in meaningful work within a high-growth, continuously evolving environment.
• Transparent Communication: Experience open decision-making and regular company-wide updates.
• Innovation-Driven: Enjoy autonomy and support to deliver excellent work and explore new ideas.
• Open Source Roots: Our work is shaped by community-driven values.
• Empowered Teams: A high-trust, low-ego culture that prioritizes outcomes.
• Career Growth Pathways: Clearly defined opportunities to develop your career.
• Approachable Leadership: Transparent executives who are involved, visible, and human.
• Passionate People: Join smart, supportive colleagues who are deeply committed to their work.
• In-Person Onboarding: Thrive from day one with fellow new 'Grafanistas' as you learn about our mission and methods.
• Balance is Key: We offer a global annual leave policy of 30 days per annum, including 3 Grafana Shutdown Days for true disconnection. (We will comply with local legislation where applicable.)

Key skills/competency

• Engineering Management
• Distributed Systems
• Telemetry Optimization
• Observability Platforms
• Team Leadership
• AI-Assisted Development
• Stakeholder Management
• Cloud Services
• Open Source Software
• Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo