Staff AppSec Architect: Lead Secure-by-Default Systems

Datadog; Rhode Island; On-site; USD 244,000 - 305,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock equity

Professional development

Mentor program

Inclusive culture

Inclusion Talks

Mental health benefits

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Datadog, a leading observability and security platform, is seeking a Staff Application Security Engineer to shape security strategy at scale. You will set frameworks, drive secure-by-default solutions, and partner across engineering teams to build secure AI-powered features and tooling.

You will own threat modeling, risk assessments, and security code reviews, while mentoring AppSec engineers and guiding architectural decisions that reduce risk across Datadog's product portfolio.

Qualifications

• Software engineering background with hands-on code review experience; Go (preferred), Python, or Rust.
• Ability to level up engineers through design reviews, mentorship, and clear documentation.
• Strong OWASP Top 10 knowledge and web vulnerabilities, SAST, and DAST.
• Solid API security knowledge: auth flows, authorization patterns, input validation at API boundaries.
• Experience leading threat modeling on complex multi-team systems.
• Ability to translate business risk into security investments and communicate to executives.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive security standards and secure-by-default solutions, serving as the Application Security subject matter expert.
• Build security tooling and automation that scales practices across engineering teams, and implement robust security observability.
• Lead threat modeling and risk assessments for high-risk features and platform changes.
• Assess and address security risks introduced by agentic development practices and AI-powered product features in production.
• Partner with engineering teams to prioritize and remediate threats, define API security standards, and conduct security code reviews.
• Identify systemic security risks; lead multi-team remediation efforts end-to-end.
• Collaborate with Cloud & Infrastructure Security and other teams on cross-domain problems; be the AppSec point of contact on complex issues.
• Serve as the AppSec SME across Datadog; translate hard security problems for engineering leadership.
• Deeply invest in the growth of AppSec engineers on the team.

Skills

Go

Python

Rust

Job description

Datadog, a leading observability and security platform, is seeking a Staff Application Security Engineer to shape security strategy at scale. You will set frameworks, drive secure-by-default solutions, and partner across engineering teams to build secure AI-powered features and tooling.

You will own threat modeling, risk assessments, and security code reviews, while mentoring AppSec engineers and guiding architectural decisions that reduce risk across Datadog's product portfolio.