Senior Staff Software Engineer

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 excel as individual contributors, technical leaders, and engineering stewards.

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’re excited about leveraging AI tools to enhance how you code, solve problems, and build – or eager to learn how.

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.