Senior Sales Engineer - AI Accounts

Datadog, Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 198,000; Full time

Job summary

Datadog, Inc. is seeking a Senior Sales Engineer for its AI Accounts team to lead the technical relationship with a portfolio of top AI labs. You will work closely with customer engineering teams in production, shaping how Datadog delivers value at scale for fast-growing labs.

You'll own discovery, run full-scale POVs in production, and partner with AE to drive expansion. The role requires deep AI/ML infra expertise, cloud familiarity, and the ability to influence engineers at all levels.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in Sales Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or similar technical role.
• Hands-on depth in AI/ML infra: GPU fleets, training, inference, evaluation, observability.
• Strong public cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP) and modern observability practices.
• Ability to engage ICs and founders in flat orgs without heavy hierarchy.
• Bias for action: solve customer problems with good judgment.
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid growth in labs/AI orgs.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical relationship across a portfolio of AI labs.
• Partner with AE to drive expansion and identify new workloads.
• Lead discovery in engineering-led organizations with no formal scoping calls.
• Run full-scale POVs in production and prove value against success criteria.
• Act as an extension of the customer's engineering/observability team.
• Communicate features, incidents, and improvements proactively.

Skills

7+ years experience

AI/ML infra

Public cloud

Kubernetes

Observability

APM

Mentoring & enablement

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

APM tools

Job description

As a Senior Sales Engineer on Datadog's AI Accounts team, you'll serve as the technical lead for a small portfolio of the world's leading AI labs — accounts that today represent a meaningful share of Datadog's revenue and are growing faster than any cohort in our business. You'll own the technical relationship end to end, work shoulder-to-shoulder with customer engineering teams in production, and help define how Datadog shows up for a cohort whose buying behavior looks nothing like traditional enterprise. This team was piloted earlier this year and is now being formalized. You'll be joining early enough to shape the playbook rather than inherit one.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical relationship across a small portfolio of AI labs, go deep on how each customer trains, serves, and scales their models (and/or the downstream products and platforms), and become the person their engineers call first
• Partner with your AE to drive expansion inside accounts that grow unpredictably and fast: identify new workloads and teams as they spin up, and get in front of them before a need becomes a ticket
• Lead discovery inside flat, engineering-led organizations where influence sits with individual contributors rather than titles, and where there are no formal scoping calls to rely on
• Run full-scale POVs in production rather than controlled pilots: instrument real workloads at real scale, prove value against the customer's own success criteria, and work through the operational realities of doing that safely
• Act as an extension of the customer’s engineering/observability team rather than an external operator - this requires judgment about which standard gates serve the customer and which to break
• Work Slack-native and asynchronously as the default, with the responsiveness and proactive posture these accounts expect: flag new features, bugs, and incidents before they ask
• Bring product and engineering in early and often, and close the loop fast — leadership needs near-real-time signal from this cohort, and you'll be a primary source of it
• Deliver technical narratives that land with engineers who pay for capability first and rationalize cost second - savings is a downstream conversation, not an opener
• Build reusable assets and patterns from each engagement so the next lab onboards faster than the last
• Keep activity, deal progress, and customer context documented and current

Who You Are

• 7+ years in Sales Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or a comparable technical customer-facing role; equivalent depth gained inside an AI lab, AI infrastructure company, or ML platform team is equally welcome
• Hands-on depth in the AI/ML infrastructure stack: GPU fleet management, distributed training, inference serving, model and agent evaluation, and the observability challenges specific to each
• Strong foundation in public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Kubernetes, APM and distributed tracing, and modern, agentic observability practice and usage patterns (i.e. MCP)
• Comfortable in flat organizations - able to engage an IC and a founder in the same week and calibrate to both without reaching for hierarchy
• Biased toward doing: you’d rather solve a customer's problem and explain the shortcut afterward than ask permission first, and you have the judgment to know where that line sits
• Thrive in ambiguity and unpredictable growth - scoping, timelines, and account trajectories will change under you, repeatedly
• Actively coachable. The strongest people we hire ask for a dry run, take the feedback, and visibly change what they do on the next attempt
• Persistent about access. Getting time with people operating at this pace is hard, and you treat that as an interesting problem rather than a demoralizing one
• Demonstrated capability using AI tooling in your own workflow and scaling it to others — credibility with this cohort depends on being a practitioner, not an observer
• Experience mentoring peers or contributing to team enablement
• Willing to travel for multi‑day onsites with customer engineering teams and for industry and research conferences

Benefits and Growth

• Best-in-breed onboarding
• Generous global benefits
• Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
• An inclusive company culture, able to join our Community Guilds and Inclusion Talks

Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog. 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.

The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is: $149,000 — $198,000 USD

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.

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