Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Location: Hybrid; New York, New York, USA, with other locations in Boston, Denver, and Remote - New Jersey.

Salary: $244,000–$305,000 USD yearly, plus equity and potentially variable compensation.

Company

Datadog provides an observability and security platform that unifies applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security, using AI to detect and resolve issues.

What you will do

• Lead the architecture and evolution of large-scale distributed systems supporting automated anomaly detection across Datadog products.
• Design and improve high-throughput streaming and batch processing pipelines for timely and reliable detection of issues in customer environments.
• Modernize and consolidate existing systems to improve scalability, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
• Define long-term technical strategy for anomaly detection and its integration with alerting, working with engineering leaders, product managers, and data scientists.
• Shape delivery of anomaly detection capabilities across products so customers can identify meaningful issues without manual configuration.
• Provide technical leadership across engineering teams and influence architectural decisions aligned with product and platform goals.

Requirements

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, particularly high-throughput or data-intensive backend platforms.
• Strong understanding of streaming and batch processing architectures, including processing large data volumes with low latency.
• Experience leading complex architectural initiatives, making technical tradeoffs, and improving the reliability and maintainability of production systems.
• Ability to drive technical strategy beyond the immediate team and collaborate with engineering leaders and product partners to create scalable platform solutions.
• Comfort working across technologies and learning new systems.
• Product-oriented mindset with the ability to connect technical decisions to customer outcomes.

Nice to have

• Experience with Flink, Kafka, Cassandra, Go, or Python.
• Familiarity with machine learning systems or deploying models in production.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid workplace emphasizing office relationships, collaboration, creativity, and work-life harmony.
• Opportunities to grow as a technical leader and influence shared platform architecture.
• Collaboration with engineers, product managers, and data scientists across multiple teams.
• Professional development, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing.
• Healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health benefits, 401(k) with match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and discounted employee stock purchase plan; benefits may vary by country and employment arrangement.