Engineering Manager, Applied AI: Frontier Agentic Models

Socket.dev; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 192,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

New hire stock equity

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Professional development

Inclusive culture and Community Guilds

Spring Health benefits

Global benefits and giving programs

Job summary

Datadog, a leader in observability, seeks an Engineering Manager I in Applied AI to guide a team of engineers and applied scientists shaping AI foundations at scale. Define technical direction, drive rapid feedback loops, and collaborate with product managers, research teams, and cross-functional partners to ship impactful AI capabilities.

You will mentor talent, help shape hiring, and drive delivery of production-grade AI systems while thriving in a hybrid culture that values collaboration,

Qualifications

• A people-focused manager with experience leading and mentoring engineers in a fast-moving domain.
• A technical leader with deep expertise in AI/ML areas: LLMs, RAG, semantic search, agentic systems, deep learning, or NLP.
• Strong evaluation methodologies for AI systems, offline benchmarks and online metrics.
• Product instinct to anchor early-stage work to concrete customer problems and shape product direction.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of engineers and applied scientists focused on building foundations for agents operating at scale.
• Shape bets from framing through broader adoption with clear success criteria at each stage.
• Own end-to-end delivery of high-quality AI systems from research to production-grade reliability.
• Balance quality, latency, cost, and safety in shipping AI-powered products and define evaluation pipelines to measure quality and detect drift.
• Contribute to cross-team collaboration and mentor career growth through coaching and hiring efforts.

Skills

People management

AI/ML leadership

LLMs

RAG

Semantic search

Agentic systems

Deep learning

NLP

Hiring and mentoring

Product collaboration

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/Engineering/ML

Job description

Datadog, a leader in observability, seeks an Engineering Manager I in Applied AI to guide a team of engineers and applied scientists shaping AI foundations at scale. Define technical direction, drive rapid feedback loops, and collaborate with product managers, research teams, and cross-functional partners to ship impactful AI capabilities.

You will mentor talent, help shape hiring, and drive delivery of production-grade AI systems while thriving in a hybrid culture that values collaboration,