Hire OpenTelemetry developers

The honest answer is: it depends on the half-life of your OpenTelemetry surface area. If your roadmap leans heavily on instrumentation across polyglot services via otel sdks and you expect to keep investing in Collector over the next 18-24 months, a specialist will out-deliver a generalist on day-30 throughput and incident response.

If your team is smaller than ten engineers, or OpenTelemetry is one of three or four core technologies, hire a strong generalist who has shipped OpenTelemetry in anger at least twice. The cross-stack pattern recognition will pay for itself the first time you need to integrate Tempo with another part of the system.

On Haystack we surface both - filtered by whether the candidate self-identifies as a OpenTelemetry specialist and verified against their last two roles. We benchmark live salary data on every offer.

A great OpenTelemetry engineer is not the one with the most stars on GitHub - it is the one who has paged at 3am for a OpenTelemetry service they wrote, and changed how they build because of it. Across the platform and infrastructure hires we have placed in 2025-2026, the same patterns keep showing up.

Every stack has its own pattern of plausible-sounding answers that fall apart in production. With OpenTelemetry, these are the patterns that most often correlate with a six-month regret hire on the employer side.

When teams ask us how to evaluate OpenTelemetry engineers beyond a CV, we recommend a 90-minute paid take-home that mirrors real work, not algorithm puzzles. The brief below is one we have refined with employers hiring platform and infrastructure teams.

Give the candidate a small, intentionally imperfect OpenTelemetry service that already does instrumentation across polyglot services via otel sdks. Their task is to add a second capability - collector pipelines fanning out to datadog, honeycomb and self-hosted backends - while keeping existing behaviour green. Grade in three parts.

By week one, the new OpenTelemetry engineer should have shipped a small change to production - typically a docs fix, a Collector dependency bump or a minor refactor in instrumentation across polyglot services via otel sdks. The goal is to validate the development loop, not to ship anything heroic.

By week two, expect them on the on-call rota in a shadow capacity, pair-programming on at least one feature, and asking pointed questions about why specific OpenTelemetry patterns were chosen. If they are not asking those questions, the hire is going to plateau.

By day 30, they should own one cleanly-scoped slice of the OpenTelemetry surface area, have a public ramp-up document, and be the named reviewer on PRs touching that area. Every Haystack employer gets a structured onboarding template - so you are not reinventing the playbook for each hire.