Senior Developer Advocate - Data Observability

What You’ll Do

• Act as a subject matter expert for data observability on behalf of the Datadog advocacy and engineering teams
• Create content in one or more mediums to build Datadog's reputation as a leader in data engineering and observability e.g. building demos, public speaking, blogging, documentation, webinars, open source, research reports and more
• Partner with and coach internal product and customer engineering teams on effective public communication and presentations for the work they do
• Contribute to the product through feedback (bugs or product enhancements suggestions)
• Identify and pursue opportunities for events, programs, and other community-focused work that establishes trust with practitioners

Who You Are

You are a trusted technical expert who enjoys helping data practitioners understand, operate, and improve complex data systems in production. You bring deep, hands-on experience in one or more areas of modern data engineering, and you use that experience to provide clear context to both the community and internal teams.

Data engineering & processing systems: You have built, operated, or supported production data pipelines using distributed processing systems such as Apache Spark or Databricks, and understand common failure modes, performance tradeoffs, and operational challenges in batch and hybrid pipelines.

Data platforms & analytics systems: You have hands-on experience with analytics platforms such as Snowflake and BigQuery, including schema design, data modeling, SQL-based analysis, and reasoning about performance, cost, and access patterns in real-world environments.

Streaming & event-driven data: You understand how data flows through streaming systems such as Kafka or similar platforms, including producer and consumer behavior, lag, delivery semantics, and how streaming issues propagate into downstream datasets and analytics.

Data quality, lineage, and metadata concepts: You are familiar with how data teams reason about data quality, upstream and downstream impact, and change management, and have experience working with data lineage, metadata, or transformation tooling (for example dbt, OpenLineage, or related ecosystems), or have operated in environments where these concepts are core to reliability.

Programming & querying: You are comfortable working in at least one programming language commonly used in data systems (for example Python, Scala, Java, or Go), along with strong SQL skills, and you can move fluidly between code, queries, and notebooks when exploring or demonstrating data systems.

You also have:

• 10+ years of experience as a software developer, data engineer, SRE, or other practitioner building and maintaining production systems
• 3+ years of experience in advocacy, developer relations, or equivalent experience reaching technical audiences through written content, conference talks, workshops, webinars, videos, or open-source contributions
• Publicly available writing samples, demos, repositories, or recordings of technical presentations
• Familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure and container-based systems
• A strong interest in self-directed learning and exploring new technologies, tools, and problem spaces

Bonus points:

• Experience supporting data pipelines for ML or AI systems
• Meaningful contributions to open source or shared technical tooling