Senior Staff Software Engineer

Visa Hunt; New York (NY); On-site; USD 272,000 - 340,000; Full time

Job summary

Datadog is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to lead multiple architectures and drive high-impact projects at scale. You will own critical systems, mentor engineers, and help shape the company’s technical roadmap.

The role emphasizes deep technical leadership, collaboration across teams, and robust system design to support Datadog’s growth and observability platform.

Qualifications

• You have a BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equivalent practical experience.
• You have 10+ years of backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering experience.
• You have 4+ years of experience leading complex technical initiatives and cross‑team projects.
• You have designed and delivered systems that are deeply technical, highly reliable, and serve critical business needs.
• You can navigate and make progress in ambiguous problem spaces, identifying the right problems to solve.
• You have exceptional communication skills, with the ability to align diverse stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
• You have deep expertise in one or more core systems domains—such as distributed storage, event streaming, networking, data infrastructure, or large‑scale observability—and broad awareness of adjacent areas.
• You care about getting things right, not just getting them done, and you raise the bar for engineering quality around you.
• You have demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day‑to‑day workflows and validate, critique, and refine AI‑generated output.
• Bonus: You’re motivated to push the boundaries of how AI can improve software engineering best practices and contribute to building AI‑enabled products.

Responsibilities

• Be the technical owner of multiple critical systems spanning several teams.
• Drive design and delivery of high-scale, high-impact projects in production.
• Build consensus across stakeholders on architectural decisions and strategy.
• Investigate and optimize performance, reliability, and efficiency in large-scale distributed systems.
• Collaborate with leadership to shape Datadog’s technical roadmap.
• Guide teams through ambiguity and scaling challenges with clear direction.
• Mentor engineers and influence culture through reviews and talks.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Communication skills

Education

BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AI coding tools

Job description

About Datadog

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 Opportunity

Datadog’s Senior Staff Engineers are technical leaders operating at the forefront of large‑scale systems design, building the infrastructure that will support our next five years of growth and beyond. They do this in three major ways:

• As individual contributors, they bring world‑class technical depth to build industry‑leading systems in areas such as observability data platforms, distributed query engines, and real‑time event streaming at global scale.
• As technical leaders, they apply broad architectural perspective and deep systems thinking to align design decisions across teams and domains. They work across complex, multi‑team problem spaces to define long‑term technical direction, drive large‑scale initiatives forward, and ensure consistent execution.
• As engineering stewards, they play a key role in evolving our systems and engineering culture. They actively participate in Datadog’s senior technical community, bringing external insights and internal experience to elevate engineering standards and mentor the next generation of technical leaders.

Examples of projects a Senior Staff Engineer may lead include designing and launching a new distributed data storage engine capable of handling hundreds of millions of records per second, building the real‑time infrastructure behind a new observability product, or re‑architecting a core service to support exponential growth in throughput and complexity.

What You’ll Do

• Be the technical owner of multiple critical systems or architecture areas, often spanning several teams or product lines.
• Drive the design and delivery of high‑scale, high‑impact projects, from vision to execution in production.
• Build consensus and alignment across stakeholders on key architectural decisions and long‑term strategy.
• Deeply investigate and optimize performance, reliability, and efficiency in large‑scale distributed systems.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers, Directors, and VPs across the company to shape Datadog’s technical roadmap.
• Guide teams through ambiguity, scaling challenges, and evolving requirements with clear technical direction.
• Actively mentor engineers and influence engineering culture through leadership in design reviews, technical talks, and working groups.

Who You Are

• You have a BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equivalent practical experience.
• You have 10+ years of backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering experience.
• You have 4+ years of experience leading complex technical initiatives and cross‑team projects.
• You have designed and delivered systems that are deeply technical, highly reliable, and serve critical business needs.
• You can navigate and make progress in ambiguous problem spaces, identifying the right problems to solve.
• You have exceptional communication skills, with the ability to align diverse stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
• You have deep expertise in one or more core systems domains—such as distributed storage, event streaming, networking, data infrastructure, or large‑scale observability—and broad awareness of adjacent areas.
• You care about getting things right, not just getting them done, and you raise the bar for engineering quality around you.
• You have demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day‑to‑day workflows and validate, critique, and refine AI‑generated output.
• Bonus: You’re motivated to push the boundaries of how AI can improve software engineering best practices and contribute to building AI‑enabled products.

Datadog 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

• 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.

Compensation

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. The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is $272,000 – $340,000 USD. In addition, Datadog offers a wide range of best‑in‑class, comprehensive and inclusive employee benefits for this role including healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.

Equal Opportunity

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.