Manager I, Engineering - Applied AI - Natural Language & Conversational Interfaces (AI)

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

Salary: $192,000–$240,000 USD per year, plus equity and possible variable compensation.

Company

Datadog's Applied AI organization turns research capabilities into production AI systems and customer-facing products.

What you will do

• Lead and develop a team of engineers and applied scientists building foundations for agents operating at scale.
• Define technical direction and shape AI initiatives from initial framing through broader customer adoption.
• Own delivery of AI systems from research exploration to production-grade reliability and operational excellence.
• Balance quality, latency, cost, and safety when shipping AI-powered products.
• Define evaluation standards and guide the development of offline and online pipelines to measure quality and detect drift.
• Coach engineers, support career growth, participate in hiring, and promote experimentation and knowledge sharing.

Requirements

• Experience managing and mentoring engineers in a fast-moving technical domain.
• Deep expertise in one or more areas including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, agentic systems, deep learning, or NLP.
• Experience with offline benchmarks and online metrics for evaluating AI systems.
• Ability to connect early-stage technical work with customer problems and define measurable success criteria.
• Experience taking AI products from 0 to 1 is strongly valued.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid workplace emphasizing office collaboration, relationships, creativity, and work-life harmony.
• New-hire stock equity through RSUs and an employee stock purchase plan.
• Professional development, product training, and career pathing.
• Inclusive culture with employee Community Guilds.
• Healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health benefits, 401(k) with match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and global benefits that may vary by country and employment arrangement.