Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Feature Flags

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

As a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer on the Feature Flags team, you'll partner directly with customers to accelerate their feature flag implementations, from initial architecture consulting through prototype builds to full-scale migrations. This role is for someone who wants to write code with customers, not just advise them. You'll work hands-on inside customer codebases to unblock complex, high-stakes deployments, directly influencing deal velocity and customer success. Working closely with Sales, Solutions, and Engineering, you'll be the technical force that turns a signed contract into a live, adopted implementation.

What it asks for · 6

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with hands-on coding ability across the stack you're deployed into
• Experience with feature flagging, experimentation, or config management systems (internal or vendor)
• Comfortable dropping into unfamiliar codebases, languages, and frameworks quickly - no specific stack required, but strong fundamentals and fast ramp-up
• Experience shipping production code, not just prototypes; you understand the difference between a demo and something that survives a migration
• Customer-facing experience, or strong motivation to build it; comfortable being in the room with customer engineers, understanding their constraints, and adapting your approach
• Ability to travel up to 20% of the time to customer sites

What the job covers

• Serve as the hands-on technical partner for strategic customers implementing Datadog Feature Flags, from pre-sales technical validation through post-sales delivery
• Consult on flag architecture and implementation approach for complex environments; multi-service, multi-platform, high-scale deployments
• Build prototype flag implementations directly in customer codebases to prove value and de-risk technical decisions early in the sales cycle
• Implement flags across diverse and advanced deployment modes (server-side, client-side, edge, mobile, streaming/real-time) tailored to each customer's stack
• Drive full flag migrations to completion, including legacy system cutover, efficiently and with minimal customer engineering burden
• Identify patterns across customer implementations and feed them back to Product and Engineering to improve the core product and reduce future implementation time
• Partner with Sales and Solutions to accelerate deal cycles by removing technical risk and uncertainty

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• customer11×
• flag7×
• implementation6×
• technical5×
• build4×
• engineering4×
• experience4×
• feature4×
• deployments3×
• directly3×
• hands-on3×
• migrations3×
• partner3×
• prototype3×
• sales3×
• stack3×

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.

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