Revenue & Cost Optimization Escalations Engineer Ii

Datadog, Inc.; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

25 days leave per year

Equipment provided

Private healthcare stipend

Social events

Job summary

Datadog, Inc. seeks an Revenue Cost Optimization Escalations Engineer II for a hybrid Sydney-based role. You own complex escalations after first line support, reproducing issues and guiding resolution with APIs and back-end tooling.

You sit between Support and Engineering, protecting engineering time while delivering durable fixes that reduce future escalations. You will be the bridge during incidents, communicating clearly with customers and internal teams, and turning recurring problems into

Qualifications

• Able to write SQL to answer questions and read API requests/responses.
• Comfortable with logs, monitoring and observability tooling.
• Experience in a SaaS technical escalation or escalation engineering role.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical escalations from first line support through resolution.
• Assess severity and impact, prioritise appropriately.
• Lead live incident communications with stakeholders.
• Escalate and coordinate with engineering until fixes are delivered.
• Produce clear root-cause write-ups for customers and for engineering.

Skills

SQL

APIs

Logs

Observability tooling

SaaS experience

Job description

Revenue Cost Optimization Escalations Engineer II

Hybrid position: working 3 days a week from the Sydney office.

This is a new role and the deepest technical seat in our Product Support function. When an issue outgrows first line support, it comes to you.

Our Product Support Specialists own the customer relationship and resolve the majority of what comes in. You own what is left: the intermittent bugs, the integration failures, the data problems, the issues that only show up for one customer on one device at one time of day. You will reproduce them, work out what is actually happening, and either fix it yourself using our APIs and back‑end tooling or hand‑engineer a diagnosis so complete that they can pick it up and go.

You sit between Support and Engineering and are trusted by both. That means being the person who protects engineering time by filtering out what does not belong with them, and the person who fights hard for the issues that do. It also means making yourself progressively less necessary, by turning each escalation into tooling, documentation or a permanent fix so that the same class of problem never has to reach you twice.

Responsibilities include:

• Acting as the single owner of technical escalations from the point they leave first line support through to resolution, keeping the ticket moving and the customer informed within our SLAs.
• Assessing severity and impact quickly and honestly, so that a genuine P1 gets the response it deserves and everything else gets prioritised proportionately.
• Running the communications during live incidents, keeping Support, Customer Success and internal stakeholders supplied with accurate updates so that nobody has to guess.
• Holding other teams accountable for resolution once an issue is with them, chasing where needed and closing the loop with the customer.

Investigation and root cause analysis:

• Reproducing reported issues across devices, platforms and customer configurations, and narrowing vague reports into a specific, evidenced failure.
• Digging into logs, monitoring and observability tooling, querying databases, and inspecting API traffic to establish what actually happened rather than what was assumed to have happened.
• Resolving issues independently where you can, using the API and back‑end tooling to correct data, unblock users and repair broken configurations safely.
• Investigating integration and authentication problems end to end, including SSO, user provisioning, HR system syncs, webhooks and third‑party APIs.
• Producing root cause write‑ups that are clear enough for a customer to be told the truth and detailed enough for engineering to act on.

Engineering partnership:

• Working alongside the rapid response engineering team as their front line, arriving with reproduction steps, logs, affected accounts and a hypothesis rather than a forwarded ticket.
• Raising and shaping bug tickets so they are actionable on first read, and representing the customer impact in prioritisation conversations.
• Verifying fixes before they reach customers, and confirming afterwards that the problem is genuinely gone.
• Feeding recurring failure patterns back into product and engineering planning, including the unglamorous fixes that never make a roadmap on their own.

Making escalations rarer:

• Building the diagnostic tooling, scripts, dashboards and runbooks that let the Product Support team resolve independently what currently has to come to you.
• Upskilling Product Support Specialists through documentation, walkthroughs and pairing on live issues, and deliberately handing down the things you have automated or explained.
• Improving alerting and monitoring so that we find problems before customers report them.
• Identifying gaps in product observability and pushing for the logging, error handling and admin controls that would make future issues self‑evident.

Requirements

You must be able to work from the Sydney office at least 3 days a week.

Who you are

• You enjoy the problems nobody else has been able to crack. Intermittent, unreproducible and "it only happens to this one customer" issues are the interesting part of the job for you, not the frustrating part.
• You have worked in a technical escalation, escalation engineering, application support or technical support engineering role in a SaaS business, or you have moved into one from software engineering, DevOps or a senior technical support position.
• You are comfortable in a terminal, in logs and in data. You can write SQL to answer your own questions, read API requests and responses, and use monitoring or observability tooling to follow a problem through a system.
• You understand how modern web and mobile applications actually fit together: APIs, authentication, integrations, background jobs and the places where they tend to break.
• You are methodical under pressure. When something is on fire you work the problem in a structured way rather than guessing, and you keep people informed while you do it.
• You write clearly for two very different audiences: an engineer who needs precision, and a customer who needs to understand what happened and what comes next without the jargon.
• You know when to stop investigating and escalate. You are comfortable saying you need help, and equally comfortable pushing back when something has been escalated that shouldn't have been.
• You are genuinely customer‑centric. Behind every escalation is a frontline worker who cannot do their job, and that matters to you.
• You can work independently and prioritise sensibly across competing urgent things, flagging early when something is at risk.

Helpful to have

• Written code in a professional setting, in any language? Useful. You won't be shipping features, but it changes how you read a bug.
• You can read code well enough to form a hypothesis about where something is going wrong, even if you would not be the one to write the fix.
• Debugged mobile apps, push notifications or offline sync? That's a lot of what we do.
• Worked with SSO, SAML, SCIM or HR system integrations? Those are some of our trickiest escalations.
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure and observability tooling, and happy poking around in logs and traces? Very handy.
• Run or participated in an on‑call rota, or written post‑incident reviews? We'd like to hear how you approached it.
• Used AI tools to speed up investigation, summarise tickets or search documentation? We're keen on people who find leverage.
• Know a thing or two about internal comms or intranet tools? Useful.
• Worked in an international team, sharing asynchronous updates? Even better.
• Speak French, German or Spanish? We'd love to hear from you.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and generous equity allocations with significant upside potential.
• 25 days annual leave per year (+ public holidays!).
• The equipment needed to do a great job.
• Private healthcare stipend.
• Social events (lunches, breakfasts, nights out).