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Staff Software Engineer – OpenTelemetry Python instrumentation | Spain | Remote

AI Summary
Grafana Labs is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build and operate distributed alerting systems within its open-source observability platform. The engineer will own work from technical ideation and design through production operations, with responsibility for reliability, performance, and availability. The role involves cloud and systems engineering, Prometheus-based alerting, high-scale evaluation workloads, on-call participation, and mentoring teammates. It is a remote Spain-based position requiring strong autonomy, customer focus, and clear asynchronous collaboration.
Remote from
Spain
Salary
EUR 97k–121k / yr
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
6 Dec 2026
Listing views
28
Application actions
0
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Opportunity details

About this role.

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana Cloud, the fully managed observability platform trusted by more than 10,000 organizations to ensure reliability, resolve incidents faster, and optimize telemetry at scale. Built on open source and open standards and designed for interoperability across any stack, Grafana Cloud brings AI to observability and observability to AI, giving teams (and their agents) unified visibility so they can see, understand, and act on all their disparate data, wherever it lives, and move at the speed of their ambitions. Customers, including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce, rely on Grafana Labs. We are a 100% remote company with team members across 40+ countries, 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 remote opportunity and we would be interested in applications from Spain.

The Opportunity:

The Grafana Alerting squad operates at the core of the Grafana open-source project (link), and our mission is to provide the most in-depth way to let users manage their alerts. The backend-focused team works closely with customers and the Grafana Cloud teams to make Alerting work on-prem and at infinite scale in Cloud. The team’s scope spans both Grafana Alerting and the SLOs product, so engineers get to work across two products that are deeply connected in how they help users detect and respond to problems.

Grafana Alerting is trusted by major organizations worldwide, monitoring essential medical devices and critical infrastructure. We thrive on collective creativity and diverse perspectives, every team member is encouraged to contribute ideas that shape our product into a dependable tool.

Our domain is quite large, so to get an idea of the kind of work we do, here are some projects we recently worked on:

  • Build distributed systems to scale alert ingestion and delivery of Prometheus-based alerts
  • Unify Alerting setup and delivery to work the same for Grafana and Prometheus-based alerts
  • Build distributed systems to scale alert evaluation of Grafana-managed alerts, reaching over 500 evaluations per second in production.

Grafana Alerting is trusted by major organizations worldwide, monitoring essential medical devices and critical infrastructure. We thrive on collective creativity and diverse perspectives, every team member is encouraged to contribute ideas that shape our product into a dependable tool.

What You’ll Be Doing:

  • Take an active role in influencing our roadmap and your own career objectives
  • Work with your team to deliver new features, then use the results to iterate and improve.
  • Drive projects from initial ideation all the way to operations once it is in the hands of customers
  • Embrace our open-source culture and contribute to other projects that may not directly fall within your team’s scope
  • Design, build, operate, and maintain critical systems, owning the reliability, performance, and availability
  • Be a part of your team’s on-call rotations and take ownership of the services you’re running
  • Mentor and support other team members, participate in design discussions and collaborate with the team
  • Learn new skills by gaining a deeper understanding of our cloud product and our customers and getting to know the codebase of a large distributed system

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.

What Makes You a Great Fit:

  • You are a motivated self starter with a bias towards action
  • You are customer focused
  • We build everything with our users in mind.
  • You have a passion for creating intuitive products that fit customers’ needs
  • Pragmatism: You are able to take on complex challenges and break them down to achieve short feedback loops: to analyze, design, and build modular solutions, deliver MVPs, gather data and feedback and then progress iteratively
  • Collaboration and communication: The smallest unit we have is a team. You’ll be working with your teammates in a fully remote setup. Good communication skills are a must
  • Solid experience with at least one programming language. We use Go, but if you have familiarity with Python, Java, C++, Rust or similar then that translates well
  • Some 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
  • Experience writing clean, robust, and performant software that is easily maintained by others

Compensation & Rewards:

In Spain, the compensation range for this role is EUR 97,000 – EUR 121,000. 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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This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

4/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

5/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

4/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThis is a staff-level engineering role involving critical distributed systems, production ownership, and on-call responsibilities. Success requires sound architectural judgment, operational depth, and the ability to lead ambiguous projects independently.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader EU market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Market rate
€109,000
EU market range (per year)€90k–€130k
AI insightThe yearly pay period is inferred from the job context; it was not explicitly stated by the employer. The employer discloses a EUR 97,000–121,000 compensation range for Spain. The posting does not state a cadence, so yearly pay is inferred from the senior full-time software-engineering context and compensation magnitude. The midpoint is EUR 109,000 per year; the estimated Spain market range for a comparable staff-level distributed-systems role is EUR 90,000–130,000 per year.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you design an alert-evaluation system that can scale while maintaining predictable latency?

I would separate scheduling, evaluation, and delivery into independently scalable components, partition workloads by tenant or rule group, and use durable queues where appropriate. I would define SLOs for evaluation latency and correctness, instrument each stage with metrics and traces, and validate capacity through load testing and failure-mode exercises.

Describe how you would investigate missed or delayed alerts in a distributed production system.

I would begin with the alert lifecycle: ingestion, scheduling, evaluation, routing, and delivery. Using correlated logs, metrics, and traces, I would identify where latency or errors began, assess customer impact, mitigate the immediate issue, and then implement a monitored corrective action with a documented post-incident review.

How do you balance rapid delivery with the reliability requirements of critical infrastructure software?

I use small, reversible releases backed by clear acceptance criteria, automated tests, observability, and staged rollout mechanisms. For higher-risk changes, I explicitly identify failure modes, define rollback plans, and ensure the team agrees on reliability trade-offs before deployment.

What is your approach to mentoring engineers while retaining ownership of staff-level technical outcomes?

I make architectural context and decision criteria visible, delegate meaningful ownership, and provide timely feedback through pairing, design reviews, and incident follow-ups. I remain accountable for system-level outcomes while helping teammates build the judgment needed to make independent decisions.

How would you contribute effectively in a fully remote engineering organization?

I would communicate decisions and progress clearly in written channels, proactively surface risks, and use video discussions for topics that benefit from fast alignment. I would also maintain strong documentation, create feedback loops with users and teammates, and make collaboration inclusive across time zones.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
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