Staff Engineer - Data Platform Experience

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

As a Staff Engineer on the Data Platform Experience team, you'll help shape how Datadog engineering teams build, operate, and evolve products on the Observability Data Platform. You'll lead the design and delivery of shared platform capabilities that reduce developer friction, improve operational visibility, and enable engineering teams to move faster with confidence. This role combines deep distributed systems expertise with technical leadership across multiple teams, influencing platform strategy while remaining hands-on in the code. You'll have the opportunity to solve company-wide challenges spanning cost intelligence, operational tooling, platform health, and developer experience.

What it asks for · 6

• You have experience designing and building large-scale SaaS or cloud platforms with deep expertise in distributed systems.
• You have strong software architecture and system design skills and have successfully led complex technical initiatives across multiple teams.
• You have a platform engineering mindset and enjoy building reusable capabilities that enable other engineering organizations to move faster.
• You are an effective communicator who can influence technical direction without direct authority and collaborate across organizational boundaries.
• You have experience with backend technologies such as Java and Go, and distributed infrastructure including Kafka and Kubernetes
• Experience with observability platforms, internal developer platforms, operational tooling, developer productivity solutions, or AI-powered engineering workflows is beneficial but not required.

What the job covers

• Lead strategic engineering initiatives that improve how product teams build, operate, and evolve services on the Observability Data Platform.
• Design and build scalable platform capabilities for cost intelligence, including cloud cost allocation, trend analysis, and optimization recommendations.
• Develop operational intelligence and self-service tooling that helps engineering teams understand platform health, troubleshoot incidents, and improve operational efficiency.
• Drive reusable platform services and developer workflows that increase engineering autonomy while reducing operational complexity across multiple products.
• Provide technical leadership across teams by influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and raising engineering standards through hands-on technical contributions.
• Participate in the team's on-call rotation and continuously improve platform reliability, observability, and operational excellence.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• platform14×
• engineering9×
• operational7×
• experience6×
• developer5×
• technical5×
• build4×
• improve4×
• observability4×
• data platform3×
• design3×
• multiple3×
• products3×
• architecture2×
• build operate2×
• building2×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

More open at Datadog

• AI Research Engineer - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)Paris, France
• AI Research Scientist - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)New York, New York, USA
• AI Research Scientist - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)Paris, France
• Area Vice President, Sales EngineeringBoston, Massachusetts, USA; Denver, Colorado, USA; New York, New York, USA; San Francisco, California, USA
• Associate Field Marketing Manager (US East and Canada)New York, New York, USA
• Associate Growth Marketing ManagerNew York, New York, USA; San Francisco, California, USA