Engineering Manager - Observability | Germany | Remote

The opportunity

Grafana Cloud is our composable observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles with Grafana. It allows our customers to leverage the best open source observability software – including Prometheus, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Pyroscope – 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.

What is the Ingest team?

We build and maintain the configuration and deployment tooling that bridges the gap between "I want observability" and "I have observability,". To achieve this the team owns Fleet Management, the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart, and the Instrumentation Hub. Fleet Management is the cloud-based central control plane our customers use to manage hundreds of thousands of Observability Collectors in the wild. The Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart is used to effectively deploy Observability Collection in Kubernetes based environments. The Instrumentation Hub seamlessly combines Fleet Management and the Kubernetes Monitoring Helm Chart to achieve a magic 1-command instrumentation experience.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Manage and develop the team of backend and frontend engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations. This is a remote team, distributed between EMEA and NASA.
• Collaborate closely with go-to-market to ensure customers and prospects are successful with their Observability collection journey.
• Work closely with product and engineering leadership to ensure Fleet Management, the Kubernetes Helm Chart, and the Instrumentation Hub fit seamlessly into the end-to-end user experience for Grafana cloud products.
• Provide guidance throughout the project lifecycle from early ideation through planning, execution and post‑launch guiding the team to deliver high‑quality results consistently.
• Foster a psychologically safe environment where engineers can learn, experiment and iterate quickly, encouraging innovation and a culture of continuous improvement.
• Work across team boundaries by contributing to projects outside your team’s scope and partnering with other functions to solve customer problems.

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 new perspective to the software.

We invest heavily in developer productivity. You can use modern AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow (your choice of tools, within security guidelines), backed by a company-funded usage budget so you can iterate quickly without unnecessary friction. We encourage pragmatic AI-assisted development: faster prototyping, test generation, refactors, documentation, and incident follow-ups—always paired with strong code review and quality standards. You'll also have access to the latest frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

WHAT MAKES YOU A GREAT FIT:

• Experience in either of these areas is a strong advantage: Observability (especially OpenTelemetry), or building a central control plane that manages fleets of collectors.
• You will be comfortable working with engineering teams who have a strong sense of autonomy in their decision-making, be it technical or product focused.
• While you’re great with people and adept at managing relationships, you still keep up-to-date with the latest technical trends and shifts in order to maintain and enhance your understanding of the challenges your teams face.
• Comfortable collaborating across time zones and cultures in a fully remote environment, using clear, empathetic communication to build trust, connection, and psychological safety.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complexity, align stakeholders, and elevate team performance to deliver meaningful, high-quality results.
• Deeply customer-focused, consistently grounding decisions and technical choices in user needs and 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 you to be curious and comfortable using AI-powered tools and ideally have practical experience folding them into a team’s workflow.

Compensation & Rewards:

In Germany, the Base compensation range for this role is EUR 109,000 - EUR 137,000. 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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