Observability - Principal Product Manager for OpenTelemetry (App SDKs)

What is The Role

At Elastic, our mission is to make the digital world observable, empowering engineers to build and run more resilient and performant software. We believe the future of observability is open, and that OpenTelemetry (OTel) is the standard that will unlock a new era of innovation for developers, SREs, and DevOps teams everywhere. We are major contributors to and believers in the OTel project, and we're building a world-class experience on top of its open foundation. Our Observability team is responsible for the end-to-end experience, from data collection to insight and action. This role sits at the most critical starting point of that journey: instrumentation. How do we make it seamless, intuitive, and powerful for developers to get data out of their applications and into our platform using the tools they already love? That's the question you'll answer.

As the Principal Product Manager for OpenTelemetry Instrumentation, you will lead the most fundamental part of our customer's journey: the first mile. You will be responsible for crafting a world-class developer experience for instrumenting applications, services, and infrastructure using OpenTelemetry. Your role is to make data collection so seamless that it feels like magic, enabling our customers to unlock the full power of our observability platform.

This is a high-impact, deeply technical product role at the intersection of open source, developer experience, and business strategy. You will be our voice and our ears within the OpenTelemetry community, shaping the future of the standard while simultaneously defining the direction for our OTel-native SDKs, exporters, collectors, and documentation. You are dedicated to the developer workflow, obsessing over everything from our "Getting Started" guides to the performance overhead of our instrumentation libraries.

What You Will Be Doing

• Own the Vision & Strategy: Define and evangelize the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for our entire OpenTelemetry instrumentation experience, ensuring it aligns with our broader observability goals and the evolving OTel landscape.
• Champion the Developer: Live in the shoes of our users. Engage deeply with developers, SREs, and platform engineers through interviews, community channels, and analytics to understand their struggles and build solutions they love.
• Lead in the Open: Be an active and influential member of the OpenTelemetry community. Participate in SIGs (Special Interest Groups), contribute to specifications, and build relationships to ensure our platform is the best place to send OTel data.
• Drive Execution: Work hand-in-hand with our brilliant engineering, design, and developer relations teams to translate user needs into clear requirements, scope compelling features, and drive them from inception to a successful launch.
• Define Success: Establish and analyze Key Performance Indicators focused on instrumentation adoption, time-to-value, ease-of-use, and data quality to ensure your product is delivering real impact.
• Enable the Ecosystem: Collaborate with marketing, sales, and solution architects to craft differentiated messaging and technical content that clearly articulates the value of using OpenTelemetry with our platform.
• Be the Expert: Serve as the internal and external spokesperson for our OpenTelemetry Instrumentation strategy, presenting at conferences, webinars, and customer meetings.

What You Bring

• An OTel Enthusiast: You are passionate about OpenTelemetry and a true believer in open standards. You don't just know what OTel is; you've used it, you understand its components (APIs, SDKs, Collector, OTLP), and you have strong opinions about its future.
• A Technical Product Leader: You have 3+ years of product management experience, ideally with a highly technical, API-driven, or developer-focused product. You are comfortable diving deep into architecture diagrams and code samples with engineers.
• A Former Practitioner (or have the approach): You have hands-on experience in the observability world. Maybe you were an SRE, a DevOps Engineer, a Software Developer, or a Solutions Architect who spent years instrumenting and monitoring complex, distributed systems.
• Customer-Obsessed: You think in terms of user journeys and experiences, not just features. You have a consistent track record of turning customer insights into a successful product roadmap.
• An Outstanding Communicator: You can effortlessly shift from a high-level strategic discussion with executives to a deeply technical debate with engineers. Your written communication is clear, concise, and compelling.
• A Community-Minded Collaborator: You thrive with working with cross-functional teams and understand the nuances of contributing to and working with open-source communities.

Bonus Points

• You have experience contributing directly to an open-source project (especially OpenTelemetry) or have deep familiarity with the Elastic Stack, Datadog, or other major observability vendors.