Director, Engineering - Observability SRE

The Observability SRE group is responsible for providing observability across Datadog's entire stack and Engineering organization. As a leader in the observability product space, Datadog can internally leverage many of its own technologies to provide comprehensive and deep visibility into systems enabling reliability, resiliency and security initiatives. Tackling observability at Datadog is a unique challenge due to the vast scale (Datadog collects over a hundred trillion events per day), complexity and critical importance of our platform, offering the chance to make a significant impact, and solve novel technical problems.

At typical tech companies, Observability is mostly seen as a cost whose goal is to drive up engineering productivity, system performance and reliability. At Datadog, this function also comes with a unique goal to lead dogfooding initiatives by partnering closely with our product teams and various system owners. Integrating cutting-edge products in a large-scale production environment such as Datadog's gives us an opportunity to improve our products and influence future product development in the industry for our customers.

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to move this organization forward. They will build and operate teams responsible for Datadog's internal observability experience, configuration and systems with the objective of meeting the company reliability and operational excellence goals. Their other function will be building deep partnerships across engineering and product management to influence a fast-growing product space.

At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships that it builds, the creativity it brings to the table, and the collaboration of being together. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our employees can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.

What You’ll Do:

• Building the roadmap and direction for Internal Observability at Datadog which impacts how Datadog engineers work everyday, build new products and operate their systems.
• Working on building a sustainable organization that can take on the ownership of critical systems required to deploy and maintain our observability stack, working closely with engineers that build the different pieces of the observability products we use.
• Collaborating with Program Managers and Product Managers to lead dogfooding initiatives, advocating for Datadog to be customer 0 and state-of-the-art in leveraging innovative solutions driven from a SRE and Security perspective. This is a unique opportunity to have an active role in the observability product space and directly impact Datadog's existing and future business.
• Growing a recently established organization by hiring internally and externally, and building a strong identity for the group  ("why do we have an Observability team when everyone builds something in this space at Datadog?"). Also, growing our existing talent (managers, staff engineers and individual contributors) and bringing people to their next level of impact.
• Working with our platform and infrastructure teams to deliver observability natively and seamlessly, increasing engineering productivity and the ability to use these advanced tools out of the box.

Who You Are:

• You’ve been responsible for building and/or rolling out an observability solution across a large scale engineering organization and stack.
• You’ve developed engineering leaders and teams who provided critical services for the engineering department. You've developed and hired talent in a group, motivating people by creating long-term plans for growth and motivation.
• You've been able to drive strong consensus and build a solution in a space for which nobody has declared "ownership" for, convincing people to move forward into a new governance model and advocating for the value this will create.
• You've developed strong relationships with product owners (either internally or externally) and you've already negotiated and advocated for your requirements, created gap analysis and tactical plans to keep a productive relationship with products/solutions your team depends on.
• Bonus points if you have been also in a position where you have achieved significant security goals for your organization on top of reliability, resiliency and efficiency goals coming from Observability investments.

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re passionate about technology and want to grow your skills, we encourage you to apply. 

Benefits and Growth: 

• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
• Intradepartmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
• An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)
• Access to Inclusion Talks, our Internal panel discussions
• Free, global mental health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+
• Competitive global benefits

Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.