Senior Staff Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

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

Salary: $272,000–$340,000 USD per year, plus equity and possible variable compensation

Company

Datadog builds a large-scale observability platform with alerting, metrics visualization, logs, and application tracing for thousands of companies.

What you will do

• Own the technical direction of multiple critical systems and architecture areas across teams and product lines.
• Lead the design and production delivery of high-scale distributed systems and infrastructure initiatives.
• Build consensus on architectural decisions and long-term technical strategy.
• Investigate and optimize performance, reliability, and efficiency in large-scale systems.
• Shape the technical roadmap with Staff Engineers, Directors, and VPs.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards through design reviews, technical talks, and working groups.

Requirements

• 10+ years of backend, infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering experience.
• 4+ years leading complex technical initiatives and cross-team projects.
• Experience designing and delivering deeply technical, highly reliable systems serving critical business needs.
• Deep expertise in at least one core systems domain, such as distributed storage, event streaming, networking, data infrastructure, or large-scale observability.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to align diverse stakeholders around a shared technical vision.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools, validate their output, and refine AI-generated code.

Nice to have

• Motivation to advance AI applications in software engineering best practices.
• Experience contributing to AI-enabled products.

Culture & Benefits

• Pragmatic, honest, and simple engineering culture focused on solving difficult problems correctly.
• Competitive global benefits that vary by country and employment arrangement.
• Healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits.
• 401(k) plan and company match, paid time off, fitness reimbursement, and discounted employee stock purchase plan.
• Continuous professional development and collaboration with knowledgeable teammates.