Senior Software Engineer, Chaos Engineering

Datadog, Inc.; Paris; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Datadog, a leader in observability, seeks a Senior Software Engineer to advance chaos engineering and zonal resilience. You will build automation to evacuate and recover workloads safely, design fault-injection capabilities, and craft safeguards for reversible production experiments.

Collaborate across teams to turn resilience findings into verified remediation. You will work on distributed systems, gRPC services, and Kubernetes-based platforms, mentoring others and advancing AI-assisted

Qualifications

• Strong distributed systems fundamentals and the ability to reason about consistency, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, quorum, retries and recovery.
• Understanding Kubernetes workload lifecycles, including pods, controllers, scheduling, draining and eviction in resilient design.
• Experience designing, building, or operating production systems where safety, availability, and controlled failure handling are important.
• Clear communication of complex technical decisions through design docs, runbooks, postmortems, and cross-functional discussions.
• Comfortable collaborating across teams to identify failure modes and drive resilience improvements.

Responsibilities

• Build zonal-resilience automation that coordinates safe evacuations, switchovers, and recovery with affected services teams.
• Design and build fault-injection systems for production environments, including testing and incident replay.
• Develop safeguards like blast-radius controls, kill switches, validation mechanisms, and rollback paths.
• Build agents and automation to propose failure scenarios, triage results, and connect findings to remediation.
• Lead gamedays from design through execution, findings, remediation tracking, and verification of fixes.
• Design and implement reliable distributed systems, including gRPC services, Kubernetes controllers, and shared components, while mentoring engineers.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

gRPC

Chaos engineering

Tools

Kubernetes controllers

gRPC services

Job description

Senior Software Engineer, Chaos Engineering

Paris, France

Datadog’s Chaos Engineering team builds systems that surface reliability weaknesses before they become outages. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will initially focus on zonal resilience, building automation that helps services safely evacuate and recover from zonal failures, while also contributing to fault injection, incident replay, gameday orchestration, and reliability tooling. You will work across engineering teams to design systems that safely exercise production failure modes and turn findings into verified remediation. You will also help advance the use of AI and automation to identify, test, and close resilience gaps as Datadog’s software and infrastructure evolve.

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:

• Build zonal-resilience automation that coordinates safe workload evacuations, switchovers, and recovery in partnership with the teams that own affected services.
• Design and build fault-injection systems for production environments, including infrastructure- and application-level testing, incident replay, and controlled resilience experiments.
• Develop safeguards such as blast-radius controls, kill switches, validation mechanisms, and rollback paths that keep production experiments contained and reversible.
• Build agents and automation that help propose failure scenarios, triage experiment results, and connect reliability findings to tracked remediation and verification.
• Lead gamedays from hypothesis and scenario design through execution, documented findings, remediation tracking, and validation of completed fixes.
• Design and implement reliable distributed systems, including gRPC services, Kubernetes controllers, and shared platform components, while contributing to technical design and mentoring other engineers.

Who You Are:

• You have strong distributed systems fundamentals and can reason about consistency, failure modes, backpressure, idempotency, quorum, retries, and failure recovery.
• You understand Kubernetes workload lifecycles, including how pods, controllers, scheduling, draining, and eviction interact with resilient system design.
• You have experience designing, building, or operating production systems where safety, availability, and controlled failure handling are important.
• You communicate complex technical decisions clearly through design documents, runbooks, postmortems, and cross-functional technical discussions.
• You are comfortable collaborating across engineering teams to understand unfamiliar systems, identify failure modes, and drive resilience improvements.
• Experience with reliability engineering, chaos engineering, zonal failover, AI-assisted operational workflows, traffic interception, or large-scale observability systems is beneficial but not required.

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We know not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That’s okay.

Benefits & Growth:

• Develop deep expertise in distributed systems, production resilience, Kubernetes, and large-scale infrastructure.
• Work on reliability systems that operate across Datadog’s production environment and influence how engineering teams design for failure.
• Grow your experience designing safe, automated approaches to fault injection, zonal resilience, and incident reproduction.
• Explore practical applications of AI and automation to reliability engineering and operational workflows.
• Collaborate with engineers across infrastructure, databases, observability, and service teams on complex systems challenges.
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to technical designs, engineering practices, and platform strategy.
• Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.

#LI-Hybrid

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:

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.

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