Senior Developer Advocate - Data Observability

Datadog; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 194,000 - 237,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

New hire stock equity (RSUs)

Continuous professional development

Free global mental health benefits

Job summary

Datadog is looking for a Senior Developer Advocate to lead projects in data observability, collaborating with teams while mentoring community engineers. Ideal candidates will have over 10 years of experience in software or data engineering and at least 3 years in advocacy roles. Strong skills in SQL and programming languages like Python or Scala required. The position offers a competitive salary up to $237,000 annually along with comprehensive benefits.

Join us to help shape the future of software development and work within a diverse and supportive company culture.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience as a software developer, data engineer, SRE, or related role.
• 3+ years of experience in advocacy or developer relations.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with programming languages like Python or Scala.

Responsibilities

• Act as subject matter expert for data observability.
• Create various content to enhance Datadog's reputation.
• Coach internal teams on effective public communication.

Skills

Data engineering & processing systems

Data platforms & analytics systems

Streaming & event-driven data

Data quality, lineage, and metadata concepts

Programming & querying

Job description

Our Senior Developer Advocates are technical leaders and mentors that anchor our team. They own projects from beginning to end, facilitating collaboration and enabling Datadog's community to solve real-world problems. With a focus on Data Observability, this role will enable our community of engineers around Datadog to be part of a movement of building better software. This is a unique opportunity to use both your engineering expertise and advocacy skills to shape the ever‑evolving technological landscape.

What You’ll Do:

• Act as a subject matter expert for data observability on behalf of the Datadog advocacy and engineering teams
• Create content in one or more mediums to build Datadog's reputation as a leader in data engineering and observability e.g. building demos, public speaking, blogging, documentation, webinars, open source, research reports and more
• Partner with and coach internal product and customer engineering teams on effective public communication and presentations for the work they do
• Contribute to the product through feedback (bugs or product enhancements suggestions)
• Identify and pursue opportunities for events, programs, and other community‑focused work that establishes trust with practitioners

Who You Are:

You are a trusted technical expert who enjoys helping data practitioners understand, operate, and improve complex data systems in production. You bring deep, hands‑on experience in one or more areas of modern data engineering, and you use that experience to provide clear context to both the community and internal teams.

You are not expected to be an expert in every area below. Instead, you bring depth in some and working familiarity across many, and you are comfortable connecting them into a coherent operational story.

• Data engineering & processing systems: You have built, operated, or supported production data pipelines using distributed processing systems such as Apache Spark or Databricks, and understand common failure modes, performance tradeoffs, and operational challenges in batch and hybrid pipelines.
• Data platforms & analytics systems: You have hands‑on experience with analytics platforms such as Snowflake and BigQuery, including schema design, data modeling, SQL‑based analysis, and reasoning about performance, cost, and access patterns in real‑world environments.
• Streaming & event‑driven data: You understand how data flows through streaming systems such as Kafka or similar platforms, including producer and consumer behavior, lag, delivery semantics, and how streaming issues propagate into downstream datasets and analytics.
• Data quality, lineage, and metadata concepts: You are familiar with how data teams reason about data quality, upstream and downstream impact, and change management, and have experience working with data lineage, metadata, or transformation tooling (for example dbt, OpenLineage, or related ecosystems), or have operated in environments where these concepts are core to reliability.
• Programming & querying: You are comfortable working in at least one programming language commonly used in data systems (for example Python, Scala, Java, or Go), along with strong SQL skills, and you can move fluidly between code, queries, and notebooks when exploring or demonstrating data systems.

You also have:

• 10+ years of experience as a software developer, data engineer, SRE, or other practitioner building and maintaining production systems
• 3+ years of experience in advocacy, developer relations, or equivalent experience reaching technical audiences through written content, conference talks, workshops, webinars, videos, or open‑source contributions
• Publicly available writing samples, demos, repositories, or recordings of technical presentations
• Familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure and container‑based systems
• A strong interest in self‑directed learning and exploring new technologies, tools, and problem spaces

Bonus points:

• Experience supporting data pipelines for ML or AI systems
• Meaningful contributions to open source or shared technical tooling

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

Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, and may include variable compensation. Actual compensation is based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience. In addition, Datadog offers a wide range of best in class, comprehensive and inclusive employee benefits for this role including healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.

$194,000 — $237,000 USD

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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