Principal Product Manager, Telemetry Collection - Observability

Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale — unleashing the potential of businesses and people. The Elastic Search AI Platform, used by more than 50% of the Fortune 500, brings together the precision of search and the intelligence of AI to enable everyone to accelerate the results that matter. By taking advantage of all structured and unstructured data — securing and protecting private information more effectively — Elastic’s complete, cloud-based solutions for search, security, and observability help organizations deliver on the promise of AI.

What is The Role

The Observability team is in charge of developing solutions that focus on application developers and engineers that run infrastructure and services supporting these applications. Elasticsearch is an efficient datastore for logs, metrics, and application traces, supporting the three pillars of observability. The Observability team builds and maintains solutions that make getting insights from this data turnkey and efficient, such as our APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, Logs, and Uptime solutions. When developing these solutions, we think about the problem end-to-end: how we manage agents and collectors, how we collect data efficiently, how we store it in Elasticsearch, and how we deliver seamless management capabilities across remote architectures.

As a Principal Product Manager for Telemetry collection within the Observability team, you will be responsible for driving the strategy and execution for our edge telemetry collectors and remote management capabilities. You will own the vision for Fleet Server, Elastic Agent, and the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) alongside classic standalone log shippers like Filebeat and the Beats ecosystem and Logstash. If you are passionate about building scalable collector management systems and empowering users to easily manage enterprise-grade telemetry pipelines, this job is for you!

What You Will Be Doing

• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Define the product vision, go-to-market strategy, and execution roadmap for the Elastic Agent framework, Fleet Server/Service, and telemetry collectors.
• Data-Driven Decisions: Define and track KPIs focused on agent deployment success, pipeline efficiency, and the adoption of our OTel distributions.
• Agent Architecture & Distribution: Oversee the packaging, testing, and distribution of the Elastic Agent, which is Elastic Distribution for OpenTelemetry Collector (EDOT) as well as standalone, purpose-specific Elastic Agent-based distributions .
• Remote Management & Control: Drive remote management capabilities for Elastic Agent, Fleet Server, and collector infrastructure to ensure smooth deployment, configuration, and control at scale.
• Kubernetes Management & Releases: Drive the vision and release strategy for our cloud-native deployments, specifically focusing on Kubernetes operators and Helm Charts to ensure seamless provisioning and lifecycle management of our agent framework.
• OpenTelemetry: Advance OTel as a primary data shipper, guiding the ongoing development of receivers and exporters across Elastic Agent (EDOT) and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector project to meet enterprise requirements.
• Log Shipping Infrastructure: Manage Filebeat (as an Elastic Agent–managed OTel receiver, or standalone binary) and oversee the maintenance of the Beats repository.
• Logstash Enhancement: Lead product initiatives for Logstash — continuing to provide the best experience for all of our many Logstash users through improved supportability, performance and customer requested enhancements.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Work closely with engineering, UX, and product marketing to deliver compelling central management and collector experiences.
• Public Advocacy: Act as a key spokesperson for Elastic’s agent framework, collector ecosystem, and collection capabilities at internal and external events.

What You Bring

• At minimum five years in a Product Management role with a specific focus on enterprise infrastructure observability, telemetry collection, or agent frameworks.
• Deep technical familiarity with collectors, log shippers, and agent ecosystems such as the OpenTelemetry Collector, Elastic Agent, Filebeat/Beats, and Logstash.
• Proven track record in defining requirements for remote agent management, fleet control planes, or distributed edge collection systems.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes operators and Helm Charts, alongside a solid understanding of cloud-native orchestration and release management.
• Previous work experience on the front lines of IT Ops, DevOps, or SRE, or a customer-facing solution architect / consultant background is ideal.
• Expertise in OpenTelemetry standards, receivers/exporters, and OpenTelemetry Collector architectures.
• Experience working closely with open-source communities and navigating the balance between upstream contributions and …