Staff Software Engineer - Watchdog Anomaly Detection
- Salary
- $244,000 - $305,000
- Level
- Staff
Not stated in the posting: work type, visa.
Open. First seen 20 October 2026.
About the role
Datadog is looking for a Staff Software Engineer to help shape the future of our anomaly detection platform. Our team builds and operates high-scale distributed systems that process streaming and batch data, working alongside machine learning systems to automatically identify potential issues in our customers' environments. As we expand these capabilities across Datadog's products, you'll play a key role in defining the technical direction, evolving our architecture, and building systems that surface meaningful insights to customers without requiring manual configuration.
This is an opportunity to solve complex engineering challenges at scale while influencing the direction of a platform that powers critical customer experiences.
At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.
What You’ll Do:
- Lead the architecture and evolution of large-scale distributed systems that power automated anomaly detection across Datadog's platform.
- Design and improve high-throughput streaming and batch processing pipelines, enabling timely and reliable detection of potential issues in customer environments.
- Drive technical initiatives to simplify, consolidate, and modernize existing systems, improving scalability, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
- Partner with engineering leaders, product managers, and data scientists to define the long-term technical strategy for anomaly detection and its integration with alerting capabilities.
- Shape how anomaly detection capabilities are delivered across Datadog products, helping customers identify meaningful issues without requiring manual configuration.
- Provide technical leadership across engineering teams, influencing architectural decisions and aligning solutions with broader product and platform goals.
Who You Are:
- You have extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems, particularly high-throughput or data-intensive backend platforms.
- You have a strong understanding of streaming and batch processing architectures, including the challenges of processing large volumes of data with low latency.
- You have experience leading complex architectural initiatives, making technical tradeoffs, and improving the reliability and maintainability of production systems.
- You can drive technical strategy beyond your immediate team, collaborating with engineering leaders and product partners to translate customer needs into scalable platform solutions.
- You are comfortable working across technologies and learning new systems; experience with technologies such as Flink, Kafka, Cassandra, Go, or Python is a plus.
- You bring a product-oriented mindset and can connect technical decisions to customer outcomes; familiarity with machine learning systems or deploying models in production is a plus, but not required.
Benefits and Growth:
- Opportunities to grow as a technical leader while influencing the architecture and direction of shared capabilities used across Datadog products.
- Exposure to complex engineering challenges involving large-scale distributed systems, real-time data processing, and machine learning.
- Collaboration with experienced engineers, product managers, and data scientists across multiple teams.
- Opportunities to develop expertise in platform architecture, technical strategy, and cross-functional engineering leadership.
- A collaborative engineering environment that encourages knowledge sharing, continuous learning, and professional development.
Datadog's standard text
Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.
#LI-HYBRID
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.
The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is:
$244,000—$305,000 USD
Datadog's standard text
About Datadog:
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 Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.
Equal Opportunity at Datadog:
Datadog is proud to offer equal employment opportunity 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 Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.
Datadog's standard text
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 this form. This form is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.
Privacy and AI Guidelines:
Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice. For information on our AI policy, please visit Interviewing at Datadog AI Guidelines.
What this role asks for
Standard for software engineering roles
Python
Common in software engineering postings at any company.
76% of this description is written for the role. The rest is Datadog's standard text, folded away below.
Compared with Datadog's other open jobs.
The team: Dev Eng HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 20 open in Dev Eng. 6 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in June: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
Datadog (20 of 20), Golang (12 of 20), Java (9 of 20), Python (7 of 20), Kafka (6 of 20), Kubernetes (6 of 20), Rust (5 of 20)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems (ODP Governance) posted Oct 21
- Senior Software Engineer - Husky Storage posted Oct 16
- Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems (Continuous Profiler) posted Oct 14
- Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems (Continuous Profiler) posted Oct 13
- Senior Software Engineer - Autonomous Ops & Maintenance (ATOM) posted Oct 2
- Staff Software Engineer - Frontend posted Sep 15
- Senior Applied Scientist - AI Platform posted Sep 2
- Technical Program Manager II posted Aug 20
- Senior Technical Program Manager posted Aug 19
- Staff Engineer, Compute posted Aug 18
- Staff Engineer, Compute posted Aug 18
- Staff Engineer - Cloud Networks posted Aug 13
- Staff Engineer - Data Platform Experience posted Aug 10
- Staff Engineer - Data Platform Experience posted Aug 10
- Senior Software Engineer - Action Platform posted Aug 3
- Senior Software Engineer - Bazel Tools posted Jul 29
- Senior Applied Scientist - Behavior AI posted Jul 6
- Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform Client posted Jun 29
- Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform posted Jun 16
From the team and dates on Datadog's own job board.
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