Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems (ODP Governance)

Datadog, Inc.; Lyon; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

New hire stock equity (RSUs)

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Professional development & career path

Mentor and buddy program

Inclusive culture

Mental health benefits

Global benefits

Job summary

Datadog, Inc. is seeking a senior backend engineer in a hybrid Lyon-based role.

You will design and build high-performance distributed systems across Metrics, Logs, APM, and Events, collaborating with product teams to minimize operational friction and costs while maximizing customer value. The ideal candidate has 6+ years of backend experience in Go, Java, Rust, or C++, with strong communication skills and a proactive, cross-team mindset.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in backend software engineering.
• Significant backend programming experience in one or more languages (Go, Java, Rust, C++).
• Distributed systems engineer with experience building high-performance large-scale systems.
• Excellent communication skills in English.
• High proactivity and cross-team collaboration experience.
• Interest in leveraging AI tools to enhance coding and problem solving.

Responsibilities

• Build performant high-scale distributed systems for Datadog's products.
• Collaborate across teams and independently gather information to move work forward.
• Onboard quickly to unfamiliar systems and navigate ambiguity.
• Anticipate dependencies and integration challenges early.
• Identify opportunities for cross-product improvements and take initiative.
• Tie engineering decisions to customer value, cost efficiency, and usability.

Skills

Backend development

Distributed systems

Go

Java

Rust

C++

Communication

AI tooling

Tools

AI coding tools

Job description

ODP Governance is a cross platform team working in the biggest Datadog products (Metrics, Logs, APM) with the mission of giving customers governance tools to control costs and data hygiene of their telemetry.

Our team builds cost controls and governance tools that help Datadog's enterprise customers manage data ingestion, reduce unwanted data, and prioritize the telemetry that delivers the most value.

Our scope spans multiple Datadog products, including Metrics, Events, Logs, and APM. As a backend engineering team, we partner with these product teams to address recurring customer challenges that create operational friction, increase costs, and contribute to churn.

We also identify opportunities to extend successful capabilities across products—for example, adapting a control developed for Logs to support APM.

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:

• Build performant high scale distributed systems to handle the load of Datadog's biggest products
• Build relationships across teams and independently seek out the information needed to move work forward.
• Become productive in unfamiliar systems and navigate ambiguity.
• Anticipate technical dependencies and integration challenges early.
• Recognize when a solution could benefit another product and take the initiative to explore it.
• Connect engineering decisions to customer value, cost efficiency, and usability.

Who You Are:

• You have 6+ years of experience
• You have significant backend programming experience in one or more languages (Go, Java, Rust, C++)
• Distributed systems engineer with experience building high performance large scale systems.
• Excellent communication skills (English).
• High proactivity and cross-team collaboration experience
• You're excited about leveraging AI tools to enhance how you code, solve problems, and build - or eager to learn how
• You have demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day-to-day workflows and validate, critique, and refine AI-generated output
• Bonus: You're motivated to push the boundaries of how AI can improve software engineering best practices and contribute to building AI-enabled products

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:

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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