Staff Software Engineer, Core Observability

About Datadog:

We're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams.  We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—providing always-on alerting, metrics visualization, logs, and application tracing for tens of thousands of companies. Our engineering culture values pragmatism, honesty, and simplicity to solve hard problems the right way.

The team:
The Core Observability team at Datadog ensures our internal observability use cases are met with reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency—leveraging our own platform at Datadog scale. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll operate as a senior technical leader with broad, cross-functional impact. You'll architect resilient and scalable observability systems, influence product direction, and drive multi-team initiatives that benefit both internal stakeholders and external customers. This role offers the opportunity to shape long-term observability strategy, elevate engineering quality across the organization, and mentor other senior engineers in a high-scale, pragmatic environment.

At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships that it builds, the creativity it brings to the table, and the collaboration of being together. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our employees can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.

What You'll Do: 

• Translate organization-wide observability needs into actionable technical strategies that influence product roadmaps and engineering priorities.
• Lead delivery of complex, multi-org initiatives—from problem framing through production deployment—at global scale.
• Architect resilient, scalable solutions to cross-org challenges including disaster recovery, telemetry ingestion, and multi-region readiness.
• Partner with engineering, infrastructure, product, and security teams to align observability practices, improve internal platforms, and shape roadmap direction.
• Improve operational excellence company-wide by refining SLOs, on-call processes, automation, and runbooks to reduce risk and improve reliability.
• Act as the senior technical authority for all telemetry production and consumption, guiding long-term strategy and alignment.
• Mentor senior engineers, influence design principles, and elevate technical standards across the Core Observability domain.

Who You Are: 

• 8+ years of experience in software or systems engineering with a focus on large-scale distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in observability domains including metrics, logs, traces, telemetry pipelines, and reliability frameworks.
• Proven operational experience owning or building critical infrastructure, including on-call participation.
• Skilled at navigating ambiguity and turning complex technical or organizational challenges into clear action plans.
• Experienced in leading long-term architectural transformations and cross-org technical initiatives.
• Strong communicator with the ability to build alignment and understanding across diverse technical and non-technical audiences.
• Highly autonomous and impact-driven, with a track record of identifying and solving high-leverage problems without needing direction.

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you're passionate about technology and want to grow your skills, we encourage you to apply. 

Benefits and Growth:

• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
• Intradepartmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
• An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)
• Access to Inclusion Talks, our Internal panel discussions
• Free, global mental health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+
• Competitive global benefits

Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.