Manager I, Engineering - Agent Data Plane

Datadog; Madrid; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

New hire stock equity

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Professional development programs

Mentor and buddy program

Inclusive culture and community groups

Inclusion Talks

Global mental health benefits

Job summary

Datadog seeks an Engineering Manager to lead a five-person team for the Agent Data Plane project. You will mentor engineers, coordinate with the technical lead, and drive the migration of data pipelines from Go to Rust to improve performance and reliability on customer infrastructure.

You will partner with senior engineers, influence architectural decisions, and help scale the platform for broader internal use while maintaining Datadog’s high standards for reliability and on-call readiness.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience managing software engineering teams.
• Strong individual contributor background (5+ years) with trust from senior engineers.
• 2+ years of hands-on systems programming in Rust, C++, Go, or C.
• Experience guiding teams through incidents and migrations.
• Experience replacing widely used technology and communicating with affected teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers across Madrid and the US.
• Own planning and delivery for Agent Data Plane migration from Go to Rust.
• Build relationships with logs, metrics, traces, and checks teams and the APM Agent team.
• Evolve Agent Data Plane into a reusable platform with minimal support.
• Collaborate on design decisions for performance, resource usage, and reliability.
• Represent the team in cross-team discussions and shape on-call rotation.

Skills

Team leadership

Technical depth

Migration planning

Incident leadership

Tools

Rust

Go

C/C++

Job description

The Agent Data Plane team is building the next foundation for the Datadog Agent: a new Rust-based platform for the telemetry pipelines (logs, metrics, traces, checks, and more) that run on our customers' infrastructure. Designed for performance, a small and predictable resource footprint, and resiliency, Agent Data Plane will take over the Agent's existing Go-based data pipelines. See a recent episode of Datadog On to hear more about the origins of this project from its technical lead: Datadog On: Return of Rust.

As the team's first dedicated Engineering Manager, you'll guide a team of five engineers, partner closely with the project's technical lead, and help other Agent teams build their pipelines on the platform. Your work will lower the cost customers pay to run the Agent, reduce Datadog's own infrastructure costs, and make the Agent's performance and reliability a lasting competitive advantage. This is also a very public evolution of the Agent's architecture: the codebase is open source, and the work lends itself to technical blog posts and conference talks. As the Agent organization grows, you'll have the opportunity to take on broader scope and grow into the next level of engineering management.

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

What You'll Do:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of five engineers across Madrid and the US, ranging from early-career to senior, helping each of them build their impact and career
• Own planning and delivery for Agent Data Plane, including the phased migration of the Datadog Agent's data pipelines from Go to Rust
• Build strong relationships with the teams that own the logs, metrics, traces, and checks pipelines built on Agent Data Plane, as well as the APM Agent team, aligning priorities and working through competing requests
• Evolve Agent Data Plane into a true platform that other teams can build on with minimal support, while staying consistent with the project's architecture and goals
• Partner with the technical lead and senior engineers on design decisions, bringing your own technical judgment to performance, resource usage, and reliability tradeoffs
• Represent the team in cross-team and technical discussions, and help shape the team's new on-call rotation

Who You Are:

• You have 2+ years of experience managing software engineering teams
• You have a strong individual contributor background (typically 5+ years) and the technical depth to earn the trust of senior engineers, including those who know more about the details than you do
• You have 2+ years of hands-on systems programming experience in a language such as Rust, C++, Go, or C
• You've owned systems that other teams or customers depend on, and you've guided your team through incidents when things broke
• You've led a team through a significant migration or the replacement of widely used technology, communicating clearly with the teams affected

Nice to Have:

• Experience with Rust
• Experience building software that runs on customer infrastructure, such as agents or collectors, rather than internal services
• Experience on a platform team whose work other teams build on
• Experience with open source software, such as working with external contributors and maintaining public repositories

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.

About Datadog:

Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across the technology stack to manage complexity at scale. It brings applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security into one place, using AI to detect and resolve issues before they impact customers. Trusted globally by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth AI leaders, Datadog enables businesses to move faster with clarity and confidence. Learn more about #DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.

Equal Opportunity at Datadog:

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