Staff Software Engineer - API Platform

Datadog, Inc.; Camden Town; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading software company is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead key initiatives on their API Platform. In this role, you will guide technical direction, design critical systems, and support the reliability of thousands of public APIs. The ideal candidate has over 10 years of experience in backend systems and site reliability engineering, and is proficient in Go. The company offers a hybrid work model and competitive global benefits.

Benefits

Competitive global benefits

Continuous professional development

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with backend systems and platform infrastructure.
• Expertise in site reliability engineering, backend architecture, or frameworks development.
• Strong software development experience, comfortable in a Go-heavy codebase.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical direction across multiple teams on API routing and infrastructure automation.
• Design edge-layer systems for traffic management before backend services.
• Contribute to internal frameworks in Go and Python used by thousands.

Skills

Backend systems

Platform infrastructure

Site reliability engineering

Software development

Go

Python

Job description

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join Datadog's API Platform group. This team owns the infrastructure and tooling behind our public API surface, which spans more than 7,000 endpoints and supports a vast range of customers and integrations. As a Staff Engineer, you will have the opportunity to contribute to a broad set of projects across multiple teams that support API routing, reliability, web frameworks, and large-scale automation. This is a high-impact, highly visible role. You will work with leaders and engineers across Datadog to drive major initiatives, influence system design, and ensure the performance and resilience of critical systems. You will collaborate with teams that build and evolve internal frameworks, traffic shaping and routing logic, reliability tooling, and developer enablement for API infrastructure. 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 technical direction across multiple teams spanning API routing, rate limiting, frameworks, reliability tooling, and infrastructure automation.
• Design and evolve edge-layer systems that handle traffic before it reaches backend services, including routing, rate limiting, audit logging, WAF, and other protective layers with strong reliability requirements.
• Contribute to the evolution of internal frameworks in Go and Python used by thousands of engineers, working closely with engineers across product teams
• Lead efforts to make it easier and safer to provision services in new data centers by building automation tools and working across opinionated teams
• Support reliability for over 7,000 public APIs, including ownership of our load testing infrastructure and Terraform provider
• Help define and implement best practices for testing, observability, and resilience across the API stack
• Mentor engineers and shape the long-term architecture and direction of the API Platform group
• Collaborate on cross-company initiatives such as MCP servers, A2A protocol, and long-term reliability requirements and improvements.
  You have 10 or more years of engineering experience with a strong background in backend systems and platform infrastructure
• You bring expertise in site reliability engineering, backend architecture, or frameworks development
• You have strong software development experience and are comfortable working in a Go-heavy codebase
• You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving work across multiple teams with differing priorities
• You enjoy mentoring, guiding teams through complex infrastructure problems, and leading high-impact projects end to end
  Get to build tools for software engineers, just like yourself. And use the tools we build to accelerate our development.
• Have a lot of influence on product direction and impact on the business.
• Work with skilled, knowledgeable, and kind teammates who are happy to teach and learn
• Competitive global benefits
• Continuous professional development
• Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.