Curriculum Vitae

Juraci Paixão Kröhling — CEO of OllyGarden, OpenTelemetry Governance Committee member, emeritus maintainer of the OpenTelemetry Collector and Jaeger.

Profile

Software engineer with experience developing modern cloud-native applications, with a primary focus on backend Go. Current interests centre on observability, telemetry quality, and tools for distributed systems. Long-time contributor to Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, and now CEO of OllyGarden, where we build tools that help teams cultivate their observability practice.

Alongside coding, I enjoy mentoring, writing, and speaking — having given 60+ conference talks across KubeCon, FOSDEM, GopherCon, DevOpsDays, Devoxx, and more.

Experience

  • CEO, Co-founder @ OllyGarden

    Jan 2025 — present

    Remote / Germany

    Building tools that help teams cultivate their observability practice — understand telemetry quality, control costs, and improve instrumentation. Also leading Telemetry Drops, an OpenTelemetry training program for engineers and teams.

  • Principal Engineer @ Grafana Labs GmbH

    Nov 2022 — Dec 2024

    Remote / Germany

    Worked in the Application Observability division as part of the OpenTelemetry Squad. Main focus on the OpenTelemetry Collector while acting as a strategic bridge between upstream communities and internal teams — bringing new themes from OpenTelemetry into Grafana Labs’ offerings.

  • Senior Software Engineer @ Grafana Labs GmbH

    Oct 2021 — Nov 2022

    Remote / Germany

    Joined the Cloud Middleware division as part of the OpenTelemetry Squad, focused on the OpenTelemetry Collector.

  • Principal Software Engineer, Tech Lead @ Red Hat GmbH

    Jan 2021 — Sep 2021

    Berlin, Germany

    Tech lead for the distributed tracing team, setting the engineering direction of Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing and Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh. Drove upstream-first solutions by creating and maintaining sub-projects including the Jaeger Operator, the OpenTelemetry Operator, and the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder — plus features around resiliency (load-balancing exporter), security (configauth), and multi-tenancy (routing processor).

  • Senior Software Engineer @ Red Hat GmbH

    Nov 2013 — Dec 2020

    Munich & Berlin, Germany

    Developer on the Kiali team focusing on distributed tracing components. Active maintainer on the Jaeger project. Earlier: sole developer on the Hawkular Accounts module (with contributions to Keycloak) and one of the sustaining engineers for JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, including a stint as lead for the WSRP module in GateIn.

  • Senior Quality Assurance Analyst @ Paymill GmbH

    Oct 2012 — Oct 2013

    Munich, Germany

  • Lead QA and Test Engineer @ Motorola Mobility GmbH

    Jun 2011 — Sep 2012

    Munich, Germany

  • QE Engineer → JBoss QE Local Lead @ Red Hat s.r.o.

    May 2008 — May 2011

    Brno, Czech Republic

    Joined as QE Engineer; promoted to JBoss QE Local Lead in Sep 2009.

  • Senior Developer @ Citigroup

    Jul 2006 — Mar 2008

    São Paulo, Brazil

  • Owner @ railsmate

    Oct 2005 — Sep 2006

    São Paulo, Brazil

  • Web Developer @ Insite Soluções Internet

    Oct 2005 — Apr 2006

    São Paulo, Brazil

  • Java Developer @ IBM

    Mar 2005 — Oct 2005

    Hortolândia, Brazil

  • Early career @ Various roles, Brazil

    Aug 2000 — Mar 2005

    Brazil

    Further job history available upon request.

Patents

Publications

Books — technical reviewer

Education

  • High School Colégio Salesiano São Gonçalo, Cuiabá, Mato Grosso · 2000

Languages

  • Portuguese Native
  • English C1 · self-assessed
  • German B1 · certified