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Principal Product Manager, OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry gives developers a portable way to describe what their systems are doing. Getting from "we emit telemetry" to "we can understand and fix the problem" is still harder than it should be.

A team has to choose and configure SDKs, preserve useful context and semantic conventions, deploy and operate Collectors, collect infrastructure and cloud signals, and keep the pipeline healthy. Then the data has to become an experience people can actually use: correlated traces, logs, and metrics; clear Kubernetes and service views; useful queries, dashboards, and alerts; and a short path from symptom to cause.

We're looking for a Principal Product Manager to own that journey end to end for Pydantic Logfire. Your scope starts with the first line of SDK configuration or the first Collector deployment and ends when a developer, platform engineer, or SRE gets an answer from the data in Logfire. This is not a role for managing an isolated backlog. You'll set the product direction across instrumentation, collection, ingest, and the experience built on top of the data.

  • Set the product strategy and roadmap for the end-to-end OpenTelemetry experience in Logfire, balancing immediate customer problems with a clear long-term direction.
  • Make instrumentation straightforward across our first-party Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Rust SDKs, standard OpenTelemetry SDKs in other languages, auto-instrumentation, and zero-code approaches.
  • Own the Collector journey: getting started, choosing components and deployment topologies, configuration and validation, troubleshooting, upgrades, pipeline health, and fleet management as customers grow.
  • Design first-class paths for Kubernetes, including the OpenTelemetry Operator, Helm, DaemonSets, gateways, workload auto-instrumentation, and the resource metadata needed to connect infrastructure to application behavior.
  • Shape managed and self-managed collection from AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, working through authentication, discovery, signal coverage, cost, and the boundary between cloud-native services and OpenTelemetry.
  • Carry telemetry semantics through the whole product. Work with engineering and design so resource attributes, semantic conventions, and correlations become useful Logfire experiences across traces, logs, metrics, Kubernetes, dashboards, alerts, and SQL.
  • Spend time with application developers, platform teams, SREs, and OpenTelemetry practitioners. Observe their real setup and debugging workflows, find where they lose time or context, and validate the product in production-like environments.
  • Define and measure outcomes such as time to first useful data, successful setup and deployment, healthy pipelines, time to answer, feature adoption, and retention—not just features shipped.
  • Work across SDK, ingest, data, frontend, documentation, developer relations, sales, and support. Make the strategy legible and drive decisions without relying on hierarchy.
  • Represent Pydantic in the OpenTelemetry community. Know when to contribute upstream, when to adopt an emerging standard, and when Logfire should add value without creating lock-in.

We expect a candidate for this position to have:

  • Several years as a product manager, with a track record of owning and shipping technically deep observability, infrastructure, developer-tooling, or cloud-platform products at senior or principal level.
  • Direct product ownership of one or more developer-facing SDKs at a previous company. You were accountable for the SDK strategy, roadmap, API and developer experience, release and adoption lifecycle, and success measures—not only an SDK user, integrator, or engineering stakeholder.
  • Working fluency with OpenTelemetry: SDKs and auto-instrumentation, OTLP, the Collector's receivers/processors/exporters model, resource attributes, semantic conventions, sampling, and the operational trade-offs of real telemetry pipelines.
  • Hands-on understanding of Kubernetes deployment models, including operators, Helm, DaemonSets, gateways, workload identity, and multi-cluster environments.
  • Experience with at least one major cloud platform and the practical problems of collecting telemetry from managed services alongside application and infrastructure data.
  • The technical credibility to work through architecture and data-model trade-offs with engineers, and the product judgment to turn those details into a simpler user experience.
  • Strong product discovery instincts. You work directly with customers, test assumptions early, use qualitative and quantitative evidence, and stay accountable for whether the result solved the problem.
  • A history of leading cross-cutting work across several engineering teams and turning an ambiguous problem into a coherent strategy, sequence, and shipped outcome.
  • Clear, direct written communication and the ability to explain a technical product direction to engineers, users, executives, and the open-source community.

Nice to haves but not required:

  • Experience moving a substantial production environment from proprietary or fragmented telemetry agents to OpenTelemetry.
  • Experience operating or managing Collector fleets, including remote configuration, custom distributions, the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder, or OpAMP.
  • Contributions to OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, or another adjacent open-source project.
  • Previous work as a software engineer, SRE, DevOps engineer, engineering manager, or customer-facing technical lead before or alongside product management.
  • Experience with observability for AI applications and OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions.
  • In your first 90 days, you have mapped the real instrumentation-to-insight journeys for our most important customer environments, established baseline measures, and aligned the team on the highest-leverage problems.
  • In your first six months, we have shipped measurable improvements to at least one complete path—SDK or auto-instrumentation through collection and ingest to a useful answer in Logfire—and have a credible strategy for the next paths.
  • Longer term, Logfire is the easiest place to send open-standard telemetry and the fastest place to understand it, across languages, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and AI workloads.
  • Live and work in a timezone between PT (UTC-8) and CET (UTC+1)
  • Able to travel to EU, UK and US up to 4 times a year to join our off-sites
  • Fluent in English

Pydantic Validation is the data validation library that powers modern Python development - 500 million downloads per month, used by virtually every tech company you've heard of. Why? Because we obsess over developer experience and write code we'd actually want to use ourselves.

We're applying that same engineering mindset to Pydantic Logfire, our observability platform with first class support for AI engineering, built for today's development reality: AI workloads, multi-language environments, and cloud infrastructure that's designed to be straightforward to set up and maintain.

We build with technologies developers actually want to work with:

  • OpenTelemetry for standardized instrumentation
  • SQL for intuitive querying (no proprietary query language to learn)
  • Rust, Python, and TypeScript for performance and productivity
  • Postgres, DataFusion, and object storage for scalable backends

Unlike other companies that pay lip service to open source, we commit over 20% of our engineering team to maintaining and expanding our open source ecosystem. This includes the core Pydantic Validation library and Pydantic AI - our rapidly growing framework that's becoming the standard for AI application development. We're signatories of the open source pledge and build on open standards because we believe in interoperability, not lock-in. Use our OpenTelemetry-based SDK with any compatible backend - we're confident you'll choose us on merit.

We're backed by Sequoia Capital and run a fully remote team across multiple time zones, with regular in-person offsites.

Join our team of exceptional engineers who value substance over hype, practical approaches over perfectionism, and meaningful progress over busyness. We've built a culture that balances technical ambition with sustainable practices—minimal meetings and respect for your expertise and time. We're creating tools that genuinely improve developers' lives, and we're looking for thoughtful contributors who share our commitment to quality and our passion for elegant solutions.

  • 💰 Compensation: Competitive salary and stock options
  • 🌍 Truly Remote: Work from anywhere within our timezone range - no office requirements
  • 🌐 Global & Diverse: Join a multi-cultural team of 8+ nationalities
  • 💪 Impact: Direct influence on tools used by millions of developers worldwide
  • 🎯 Focus on Growth: Regular opportunities for learning and professional development
  • 🤝 Team Gatherings: Connect with the team at our regular international off-sites
  • 🏥 Healthcare: Comprehensive health coverage for you and your dependents
  • 🎮 Flexible Hours: Work when you're most productive
  • 💻 Equipment: Budget for your home office setup
  • ⚖️ Work-Life Balance: flexible working hours and 33 days PTO no matter where you live (including public holidays, which you can choose to take or not)

To make your application stand out, tell us about an SDK you owned as a product manager: what you were accountable for, how you improved its developer experience and adoption, and how you measured success. Include one trade-off you made between contributing to an open standard and building product-specific value.

Application

To apply, email careers@pydantic.dev with the job title in the subject line. We'd also appreciate a few lines explaining why you think you'd be a good fit for the role and what you've done in the past that evidences that.

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