Senior Software Engineer

Opportunity

Datadog’s Senior Staff Engineers are technical leaders operating at the forefront of large-scale systems design, building the infrastructure that will support our next five years of growth and beyond. They do this in three major ways: individual contributors bring world‑class technical depth to build industry‑leading systems in areas such as observability data platforms, distributed query engines, and real‑time event streaming at global scale;

technical leaders apply broad architectural perspective and deep systems thinking to align design decisions across teams and domains, working across complex, multi‑team problem spaces to define long‑term technical direction and drive large‑scale initiatives forward; engineering stewards play a key role in evolving our systems and engineering culture, actively participating in Datadog’s senior technical community and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

• Be the technical owner of multiple critical systems or architecture areas, often spanning several teams or product lines.
• Drive the design and delivery of high‑scale, high‑impact projects, from vision to execution in production.
• Build consensus and alignment across stakeholders on key architectural decisions and long‑term strategy.
• Deeply investigate and optimize performance, reliability, and efficiency in large‑scale distributed systems.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers, Directors, and VPs across the company to shape Datadog’s technical roadmap.
• Guide teams through ambiguity, scaling challenges, and evolving requirements with clear technical direction.
• Actively mentor engineers and influence engineering culture through leadership in design reviews, technical talks, and working groups.

• You have a BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equivalent practical experience.
• You have 10+ years of backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering experience.
• You have 4+ years of experience leading complex technical initiatives and cross‑team projects. You have designed and delivered systems that are deeply technical, highly reliable, and serve critical business needs.
• You can navigate and make progress in ambiguous problem spaces, identifying the right problems to solve.
• You have exceptional communication skills, with the ability to align diverse stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
• You have deep expertise in one or more core systems domains—such as distributed storage, event streaming, networking, data infrastructure, or large‑scale observability—and broad awareness of adjacent areas.
• You care about getting things right, not just getting them done, and you raise the bar for engineering quality around you.
• You’re excited about leveraging AI tools to enhance how you code, solve problems, and build – or eager to learn how.

• Get to build tools for software engineers, just like yourself. And use the tools we build to accelerate our development.
• Have a lot of influence on product direction and impact on the business.
• Work with skilled, knowledgeable, and kind teammates who are happy to teach and learn.
• Competitive global benefits.
• Continuous professional development.

Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, and may include variable compensation. Actual compensation is based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience. In addition, Datadog offers a wide range of best‑in‑class, comprehensive and inclusive employee benefits for this role including healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.

The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is: $272,000—$340,000 USD.

Datadog is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and other characteristics protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.