Remote Engineering Manager, Observability Dept | UK | Remote in Kent

Grafana Labs is a remote-first, open-source powerhouse. There are more than 20M users of Grafana, the open source visualization tool, around the globe, monitoring everything from beehives to climate change in the Alps. The instantly recognizable dashboards have been spotted everywhere from a NASA launch and Minecraft HQ to Wimbledon and the Tour de France. Grafana Labs also helps more than 3,000 companies -- including Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase, and eBay -- manage their observability strategies with the Grafana LGTM Stack, which can be run fully managed with Grafana Cloud or self-managed with the Grafana Enterprise Stack, both featuring scalable metrics (Grafana Mimir), logs (Grafana Loki), and traces (Grafana Tempo). 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.

This is a remote position. We are looking for candidates in the NASA (EST-only) or EMEA time zones.

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 You'll Be Doing:

• Manage and develop the team of Alloy engineers, providing regular feedback and supporting each person’s growth through career conversations.
• Support the Alloy team on their path to closer collaboration with the OpenTelemetry collector community.
• Address roadblocks.
• Collaborate closely with go-to-market to ensure customers and prospects are successful with their Alloy journey.
• Work closely with product and engineering leadership to ensure Alloy fits 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 frontier models (e.g., GPT-Codex 5.4, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3 Pro).

What are we looking for in you?

• You should have enough domain knowledge in observability and OpenTelemetry to manage a team that will collaborate closely with the OpenTelemetry collector community.
• 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.

In the UK, the Base compensation range for this role is GBP 103,709 - GBP 124,651. 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.