David Kaltschmidt
VP Of Engineering at Grafana Labs
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Kaltschmidt is a seasoned engineering leader and founder with 15 years of experience building developer tooling, observability platforms, and rich front-end experiences. Currently VP of Engineering at Grafana Labs, he has shaped the company’s move to multi-tenant, DevOps-first architecture and is driving Agentic engineering and business observability initiatives. He combines hands-on work — from React-based visualisations and PromQL editor UX to backend Prometheus/Loki instrumentation — with organisational design, scaling teams from early-stage UX to 1500+ company growth. A founder-turned-executive, he led successful exits (Kausal → Grafana, Type Type Type → Weaveworks) and brings product instincts honed across startups and large enterprises. Known for marrying elegant visual design with robust distributed-systems telemetry, he prioritises safe, engaging workplaces and repeatable hiring and interview practices. Based in Berlin, he remains an active open-source contributor on high-profile repos like Grafana and Prometheus, blending product leadership with code-level impact.
14 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Computer Science at Universidad Autónoma de MadridMaster of Science (MSc), Computer Science, Master of Science (MSc), Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Danish
Stackoverflow
61reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (45)
timeseries-database10
monitoring10
javascript10
bootstrap10
apidoc10
css10
go10
prometheus10
api10
front-end-development10
promql10
cloki10
html10
lokijs10
bootstra10
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
weaveworks/scope
May 2015 - May 2017
Monitoring, visualisation & management for Docker & Kubernetes
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:4 releases, 440 commits, 269 PRs in 2 years
Contributions summary:David primarily worked on implementing and styling UI components for the `weaveworks/scope` project, which is a monitoring and visualization tool. Their commits focused on creating a new logo, applying company colors, and refactoring the code to improve the UI's appearance. They also made changes to CSS and JavaScript files, and used React to build and structure components.
containersecsvisualisationdockerobservability
grafana/grafana
Dec 2017 - Mar 2022
The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:50 reviews, 516 commits, 445 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:David primarily worked on improving the Loki data source integration within Grafana. Their contributions include fixing timestamp field issues, making the query limit configurable, enhancing query functionality, and incorporating more log levels. Additionally, the user addressed issues with the Explore feature and its data models, as well as made adjustments to the Prometheus data source, including fixing annotation step calculations and improving metrics browser functionality. The user also implemented various improvements such as supporting the new LogQL filtering syntax, and integrating with the Tempo trace viewer.
visualizeobservabilitybusiness-intelligencegrafanaprometheus
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