Senior AI Engineer - APM Experiences

At Datadog, a Most Loved Workplace® certified employer in the Technology space, Observe, Secure, and Optimize Modern Cloud Infrastructure at Scale.

<h2><strong>The opportunity</strong></h2>

<p>Datadog’s APM Experiences team owns the core product experience for <a href="https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/">Application Performance Monitoring</a> — including distributed tracing, service representation, and more. We’re building a new wave of AI-powered capabilities that help customers <em>detect, resolve, and prevent</em> performance issues faster. In this role, you will lead end‑to‑end development of LLM- and Agent‑based features that can:</p>

<ul>

<li>Debug and investigate application performance issues down to the root cause, as both a developer assistant and a fully autonomous agent</li>

<li>Proactively recommend performance and reliability-based optimizations to prevent the next incident</li>

<li>Automatically create intelligent monitors and SLOs for the most important business flows and critical paths</li>

</ul>

<p>This is a highly product‑minded engineering role: you’ll work from problem discovery and UX all the way to reliable, scalable production systems.</p>

<h2><strong>What you’ll do</strong></h2>

<ul>

<li><strong>Shape AI experiences for APM.</strong> Design and ship LLM/agentic workflows that analyze traces, metrics, logs, and other telemetry to generate diagnoses, explanations, and guided fixes.</li>

<li><strong>Own the full loop.</strong> Prototype quickly, define success metrics and evals, run experiments, iterate, and ultimately productionize for scale and reliability.</li>

<li><strong>Build robust agent systems.</strong> Develop tools, retrieval and planning strategies, and guardrails; manage prompts/evals; design fallbacks and human‑in‑the‑loop paths.</li>

<li><strong>Integrate with Datadog’s platform.</strong> Leverage surfaces like Trace Explorer, Service Catalog, monitors, and workflows to deliver end‑to‑end value in the APM UI.</li>

<li><strong>Partner deeply.</strong> Collaborate with PM, Design, and partner teams to build cohesive experiences.</li>

<li><strong>Raise the bar on engineering.</strong> Write performant, maintainable backend code, own services in production, and improve reliability for high‑throughput, low‑latency data systems.</li>

</ul>

<h2><strong>Who you are</strong></h2>

<p><strong>Product‑minded engineer who ships AI to production</strong></p>

<ul>

<li>4+ years building backend or real-time ML systems; you value simplicity, correctness, and performance</li>

<li>Proven experience delivering LLM/agent features to production (prompting, tooling, evals, safety/guardrails)</li>

<li>Comfortable owning user journeys, iterating from prototype → alpha → GA, and measuring impact with clear product metrics</li>

<li>You have demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day-to-day workflows and validate, critique, and refine AI-generated output</li>

<li>You’re motivated to push the boundaries of how AI can improve software engineering best practices and contribute to building AI-enabled products</li>

</ul>

<p><strong>Strong ML / applied science fundamentals</strong></p>

<ul>

<li>Solid grasp of the ML lifecycle (task definition, dataset collection, modeling, evaluation, deployment, iteration) and statistics (experiment design, confidence intervals)</li>

<li>Experience choosing/modeling the right technique for the job (e.g., anomaly detection, ranking/recommendation, NLP), and knowing when a heuristic beats a model</li>

<li>Fluency with offline/online evals for AI systems; can build reliable golden sets and automatic regressions</li>

</ul>

<p><strong>Distributed systems & observability savvy</strong></p>

<ul>

<li>Experience with microservices performance: tracing, latency breakdowns, concurrency, and resiliency patterns</li>

<li>Proficient in Go, Java, or Python; strong API/service design; production ops (monitoring, alerting, on‑call rotation)</li>

</ul>

<p><strong>Nice to have</strong></p>

<ul>

<li>Hands‑on with distributed tracing stacks (OpenTelemetry/Datadog APM), profilers, and logs/metrics pipelines</li>

<li>Exposure to planning/agent frameworks, tool‑use orchestration, RAG, and retrieval/indexing for observability data</li>

<li>Familiarity with SLO/SLA practices and incident response</li>

</ul>

<h4>Benefits and Growth:</h4>

<ul>

<li>Get to build tools for software engineers, just like yourself. And use the tools we build to accelerate our development.</li>

<li>Have a lot of influence on product direction and impact on the business.</li>

<li>Work with skilled, knowledgeable, and kind teammates who are happy to teach and learn.</li>

<li>Competitive global benefits.</li>

<li>Continuous professional development.<br><br></li>

</ul>

<p><em>Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.</em></p>

<p> </p>

<p style="color: white;">#LI-Hybrid</p><div class="content-pay-transparency"><div class="pay-input"><div class="description"><p>Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, and may include variable compensation. Actual compensation is based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience. In addition, Datadog offers a wide range of best in class, comprehensive and inclusive employee benefits for this role including healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.</p></div><div class="title">The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is:</div><div class="pay-range"><span>$187,000</span><span class="divider">—</span><span>$240,000 USD</span></div></div></div><div class="content-conclusion"><hr>

<p><strong>About Datadog: </strong></p>

<p>Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across the technology stack to manage complexity at scale. It brings applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security into one place, using AI to detect and resolve issues before they impact customers. Trusted globally by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth AI leaders, Datadog enables businesses to move faster with clarity and confidence. Learn more about #DatadogLife on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/datadoghq/?hl=en" target="_blank">Instagram</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/Datadog" target="_blank">LinkedIn,</a> and <a href="https://learn.datadoghq.com/" target="_blank">Datadog Learning Center. </a></p>

<hr>

<p data-renderer-start-pos="215"><strong data-renderer-mark="true">Equal Opportunity at Datadog:</strong></p>

<p>Datadog is proud to offer <a href="https://www.eeoc.gov/sites/default/files/2023-06/22-088_EEOC_KnowYourRights6.12ScreenRdr.pdf" target="_blank">equal employment opportunity</a> to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and other characteristics protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/legal/candidate-legal-notices/" target="_blank">Candidate Legal Notices</a> for your reference. </p>

<p>Datadog endeavors to make our Careers Page accessible to all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please complete <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeoJeduEZ2NdZF_65uZmWUrCM-zee7yADXX1s6Xr9zAGq8iKA/viewform" target="_blank">this form</a>. This form is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications. </p>

<p data-renderer-start-pos="662"><strong data-renderer-mark="true">Privacy and AI Guidelines:</strong></p>

<p data-renderer-start-pos="662">Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s <a class="c-link" href="https://www.datadoghq.com/legal/applicant-candidate-privacy/" target="_blank" data-stringify-link="https://www.datadoghq.com/legal/applicant-candidate-privacy/" data-sk="tooltip_parent">Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice</a>. For information on our AI policy, please visit <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/legal/interviewing-at-Datadog-ai-guidelines/" target="_blank">Interviewing at Datadog AI Guidelines</a>.</p></div>

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