Staff Application Security Engineer (AI)

Location: Onsite in Boston, Massachusetts or New York, New York; remote from Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, or Rhode Island, USA.

Salary: $244,000–$305,000 USD per year, plus equity and possible variable compensation.

Company

Datadog provides a monitoring and security platform used to observe applications, infrastructure, services, and security posture.

What you will do

• Define application security standards, secure-by-default frameworks, and architectural patterns across engineering teams.
• Build scalable security tooling, automation, and observability that produces actionable signals for threat detection.
• Lead threat modeling and risk assessments for high-risk features, platform changes, and complex multi-team systems.
• Assess security risks from agentic development practices and AI-powered product features in production.
• Partner with engineering, product, cloud, and infrastructure security teams on API standards, code reviews, threat remediation, and cross-domain initiatives.
• Shape the AppSec roadmap, prioritize security investment, and mentor AppSec engineers.

Requirements

• Software engineering background with hands-on code review experience in Go, Python, or Rust.
• Strong knowledge of OWASP Top 10, web vulnerabilities, cryptography, SAST, and DAST.
• Working knowledge of API authentication, authorization, and input validation.
• Experience leading threat modeling for complex multi-team systems and converting findings into architectural decisions.
• Experience implementing secure-by-default frameworks and integrating security into core platforms.
• Knowledge of software supply chain security, including dependency management, artifact integrity, and build pipeline trust.

Nice to have

• Experience addressing security risks in AI-powered products and agentic development workflows.
• Experience influencing technical and non-technical stakeholders and communicating security tradeoffs to executives.

Culture & Benefits

• New-hire stock equity and employee stock purchase plan.
• Professional development, product training, career pathing, mentoring, and a buddy program.
• Inclusive culture with employee resource groups, community guilds, and internal Inclusion Talks.
• Global mental health benefits for employees and dependents aged six and older.
• Benefits may vary by country of employment and employment arrangement; U.S. benefits include healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health support, 401(k) matching, paid time off, fitness reimbursement, and discounted stock purchase plan.