Staff Statistics Engineer - Feature Flagging and Experimentation

Datadog; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 234,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive global benefits

Continuous professional development

Collaborative office culture

Job summary

Datadog is seeking a Stats Engineering leader to develop new products including Feature Flags and Experiments. This rare role combines statistical expertise with software engineering, aiming to build a world-class experimentation engine used across diverse customer bases. You will influence product direction and collaborate across teams to define foundational components for Datadog's Product Analytics.

The role requires a PhD or equivalent in relevant fields and experience in production-grade software solutions. Join Datadog to contribute significantly to product analytics and innovation in a hybrid work environment.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent experience in Statistics or related fields.
• Track record of shipping production-grade software.
• Strong understanding of statistical elegance vs. engineering complexity.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement experimentation engine for Datadog Experiments.
• Translate complex statistical methods into robust systems.
• Educate teams on statistical best practices and experiment design.

Skills

Statistics

Software Engineering

Causal Inference

Experimentation Methods

Education

PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, Econometrics or related field

Tools

Production-Grade Software

Job description

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Stats Engineering leader to help us build two new Datadog products from scratch - Feature Flags and Experiments.

Our goal with these products is to help developers and product teams ship features quickly, experiment as second-nature, and make decisions with confidence. To do this, we need to build a world-class experimentation engine, backed by state-of-the-art statistical methods like sequential analysis, CUPED, and change point detection, which help to solve the big problems in the experimentation world of early peeking, long experiment durations, and catching bugs respectively.

Because there is often a technical, cultural, and linguistic gap between software engineers and statisticians, our Stats Engineers are unique in that they don't squarely fall into data science or software engineering. Data scientists typically understand the concepts, but may struggle to implement them in production with enterprise grade quality. Software engineers know how to build robust production systems, but can get lost implementing methods that don't have off the shelf frameworks. Here, we need the rare breed of builder who understands statistical concepts and can implement them in production.

Our experimentation platform will be used for root-cause analysis and decision-making across our 30,000+ customers of all shapes, sizes, and industries; we’ll help customers run everything from e-commerce-focused A/B tests on user adoption to infrastructure-based canary deployments in real-time to root cause major incidents, and connect the dots together across the worlds of the product manager, data person, and developer.

This is a rare opportunity to work with senior leaders across engineering, product, and design to define the foundational components of Datadog’s Product Analytics and APM stack from the ground up, and develop an experimentation engine in an AI-first world.

At Datadog, 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:

• Architect and implement the world-class experimentation engine behind Datadog Experiments, supporting methods like sequential testing, CUPED, variance reduction, and more
• Bring rigor to experiment analysis at scale (e.g. through diagnostics, guardrails for safe shipping)
• Translate complex statistical methods into robust, production-ready systems
• Work closely with Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to influence the direction of the product, on both a day-to-day and the big picture vision
• Educate engineers, leaders at Datadog, and our largest customers on statistical best practices, experiment design, and practical inference
• Help define standards and frameworks to make experimentation at Datadog trustworthy by default and fast by design

Who You Are:

• You hold a PhD or equivalent experience in Statistics, Computer Science, Econometrics, or a related field. You have deep expertise in statistics, causal inference, or experimentation methods.
• You have a track record of shipping production-grade software that solves real user problems
• You understand the tradeoffs between statistical elegance and engineering complexity, and you know how to strategically make bets
• You have strong software engineering fundamentals and can write clean, maintainable code
• You can lead cross-functionally – with Engineering, Product, Design, and business teams.
• Bonus: You’ve built or worked on experimentation platforms at scale

Benefits and Growth:

• Build tools for engineers like yourself – we use our own products everyday to make decisions
• Influence the experimentation and AI-centric roadmap for Product Analytics, a budding, new sector for Datadog
• Work with kind and knowledgeable teammates who are at the top of their craft and happy to collaborate, 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.

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.

Salary: $234,000 — $300,000 USD

About Datadog:

Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) is a global SaaS business, delivering a rare combination of growth and profitability. We are on a mission to break down silos and solve complexity in the cloud age by enabling digital transformation, cloud migration, and infrastructure monitoring of our customers’ entire technology stacks. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries. Together, we champion professional development, diversity of thought, innovation, and work excellence to empower continuous growth. Join the pack and become part of a collaborative, pragmatic, and thoughtful people-first community where we solve tough problems, take smart risks, and celebrate one another. Learn more about #DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.

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.

Your Privacy:

Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice.