Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Location: New York, New York, USA; hybrid workplace

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

Company

Datadog develops observability and log management products for ingesting, querying, and analyzing customer data.

What you will do

• Define ambiguous product requirements and identify impactful solutions in partnership with Product Managers and customers.
• Lead technical strategy and execution for log query performance and large-scale ingestion systems.
• Design and scale backend systems, distributed infrastructure, and real-time data pipelines.
• Prototype AI-powered log management, security, business operations, advanced query, and external data source capabilities.
• Mentor engineers across levels and contribute to a collaborative engineering culture.

Requirements

• Deep experience architecting and scaling backend systems focused on data-intensive or distributed infrastructure.
• Experience debugging complex systems and optimizing performance across real-time data pipelines.
• Experience defining product direction and delivering impactful features with Product Managers and customers.
• Experience using AI agent and AI coding tools in daily engineering workflows, including validating, critiquing, and refining generated output.
• Strong technical leadership, pragmatic decision-making, curiosity, and mentoring skills.

Nice to have

• Motivation to advance AI-enabled software engineering practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid office culture focused on collaboration, relationships, creativity, and work-life harmony.
• Competitive benefits, healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health coverage.
• 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and employee stock purchase plan.
• New-hire stock equity, continuous career development, and structured onboarding.
• Internal mentoring and cross-departmental buddy programs.