Senior Staff Software Engineer

Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing unified visibility across the technology stack. 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.

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will be a technical leader operating at the forefront of large-scale systems design, building infrastructure to support our next five years of growth. You will work as an individual contributor, technical leader, and engineering steward.

• 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 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.

• BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering experience.
• 4+ years of experience leading complex technical initiatives and cross-team projects.
• Designed and delivered systems that are deeply technical, highly reliable, and serve critical business needs.
• 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.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day-to-day workflows and validate, critique, and refine AI-generated output.

Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, including healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan. Benefits may vary based on country and nature of employment.

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