Senior Software Engineer - Incident Insights & Readiness

Datadog, Inc.; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSUs stock equity

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Professional development

Job summary

Datadogs is seeking a senior SRE to own and improve the on-call experience and incident response tooling. You will collaborate with product teams to streamline procedures, contribute to post-mortems, and reduce friction while embedding with engineering squads to boost reliability.

You have 5+ years building distributed systems and improving incident response, with Go/Python strengths and Kubernetes familiarity.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building software that solves real user problems.
• Experience designing features and participating in code and design reviews.
• Proficient in Go and Python; some TypeScript experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own and improve on-call experience; define best practices and platforms.
• Lead design and implement incident response tooling to streamline processes.
• Contribute to post-mortems and drive learning value; run weekly postmortem discussions.

Skills

Go

Python

TypeScript

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Incident management

Mentoring

Tools

Docker

Terraform

Job description

We're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—providing always-on alerting, metrics visualization, logs, and application tracing for tens of thousands of companies. Our engineering culture values pragmatism, honesty, and simplicity to solve hard problems the right way

The Incident Insights & Readiness SRE team at the company fosters a resilient culture by using incidents as learning opportunities and catalysts for growth. Our users are the company engineers, and we build the software, tooling, and operational frameworks that help them prepare for, respond to, and learn from incidents. We work closely with engineering teams across the company to analyze incidents and turn those insights into better tools, stronger incident response, and organizational learning. Our efforts empower the company to navigate unexpected failures confidently, efficiently, and with a commitment to continuous learning and systems improvement.

*At the company, 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:

• Own and improve the on-call experience for the company by establishing best practices and building platforms to support on-call rotations and compensation.
• Define how we respond to incidents, lead the design and implementation of software to streamline the process, and collaborate with product teams to improve incident response across the company. Our aim is to fully support our incident responders in dealing with complexity.
• Contribute to the post-mortem process for the company, collaborating with teams on writing them, and identifying opportunities to reduce friction and enhance learning value for the organization. Our team also runs a weekly postmortem reading group.
• Support various teams in facilitating incident reviews that emphasize learning and blamelessness. Help them share their learnings across the organization to improve the resilience of our people.
• Provide technical leadership and day-to-day coaching to team members, accelerating their growth through design reviews, collaborative problem-solving and operational excellence best practices.
• Train our on-callers in incident and post-mortem processes, sharing expertise in incident management best practices. This involves both introducing newcomers to on-call responsibilities and refreshing the knowledge of existing engineers.
• Lead cross-functional initiatives in engineering organizations across the company, embedding with teams to understand their challenges and drive lasting improvements to reliability and operational excellence.

Who You Are:

• At least 5 years of experience building software that solves real user problems. Experience designing new features and collaborating on code and technical design reviews. We primarily develop in Go and Python, with a bit of TypeScript.
• Experience building or operating distributed systems, with familiarity with Kubernetes and an understanding of complex failure modes.
• Demonstrated ability to independently own ambiguous technical problems from design through delivery while balancing long-term engineering quality with pragmatic execution.
• Experience analyzing incidents, identifying systemic risks, and driving engineering improvements informed by operational learnings.
• Experience participating in on-call rotations and improving incident response processes. Experience serving as an incident commander or incident coordinator is a plus.
• Empathy, collaboration, and communication skills in English to cultivate strong relationships across various teams in the organization.
• Experience mentoring engineers, driving cross-functional initiatives, and influencing technical direction without relying on organizational authority.
• We welcome candidates from a variety of backgrounds, including software engineering, site reliability engineering, production engineering, infrastructure, and other roles focused on building reliable systems or improving incident response.

*the company 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 (the company 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