Senior Datadog Engineer - NO C2C

Location: SEC Headquarters – Washington, DC 20549

Position Type: Onsite (Government Site – No Telework)

Contract Duration: 07/20/2026 – 01/19/2027 (6 Months, Extension Possible)

Target Start Date: 07/20/2026

Program: SEC ISS 2

Clearance Requirement: Public Trust

Citizenship Requirement: U.S. Citizen Only (No Dual Citizenship)

Overtime: Possible (Manager Pre-Approval Required)

Conversion Potential: Possible Full-Time Opportunity

Role Summary

We are seeking a Senior Datadog Cloud Engineer to provide technical leadership for enterprise observability, application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, and cloud monitoring supporting the SEC Infrastructure Support Services (ISS) contract. This hands-on engineering role is responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing an enterprise observability platform across hybrid cloud and containerized environments while improving system reliability, availability, and operational performance.

The ideal candidate will possess deep expertise in Datadog (or equivalent observability platforms), Azure and AWS cloud monitoring, Kubernetes/OpenShift, performance engineering, and enterprise-scale operational analytics.

Key Responsibilities

Observability Platform Engineering

• Engineer, administer, and optimize enterprise observability platforms including:
• Datadog (preferred)
• Dynatrace
• New Relic
• Splunk Observability
• Grafana/Prometheus
• Design and maintain:
• Dashboards
• APM
• Distributed tracing
• Log pipelines
• RUM (Real User Monitoring)
• Synthetic monitoring
• Network Performance Monitoring
• Build and maintain:
• SLOs
• SLIs
• Alerting policies
• Monitoring standards
• Instrument applications and infrastructure using:
• OpenTelemetry
• Language-specific tracers
• W3C TraceContext propagation
• Unified service tagging
• Develop integrations between observability platforms and:
• ServiceNow
• CI/CD pipelines
• On-call notification systems
• Define and enforce enterprise telemetry tagging standards

Cloud & Container Monitoring

• Design monitoring solutions for:
• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Monitor:
• PaaS services
• Serverless workloads
• Networking
• Identity services
• Managed databases
• Engineer monitoring for:
• AWS RDS
• Aurora
• Azure SQL
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• SQL Server
• Oracle
• DynamoDB
• Cosmos DB
• ElastiCache/Redis
• Design observability solutions for:
• OpenShift
• Kubernetes
• Service Mesh
• Cluster health
• Workload performance
• Develop reusable Infrastructure-as-Code monitoring modules

Performance Engineering

• Lead performance investigations involving:
• Latency
• Reliability
• Capacity
• Resource utilization
• Analyze:
• Distributed traces
• Dependency maps
• Code profiling
• Database query performance
• Exception tracking
• RUM correlations
• Partner with engineering teams to implement performance improvements
• Develop trace-based deployment tracking and change correlation processes
• Provide technical leadership during production incidents and root cause analysis

Capacity & Reliability Engineering

• Analyze operational telemetry and performance trends
• Develop capacity planning dashboards and executive reports
• Define:
• Capacity thresholds
• Alert baselines
• Scaling recommendations
• Improve:
• Monitoring coverage
• Alert quality
• Operational maturity
• SLA/KPI compliance

Required Technical Skills

• Minimum 8 years of IT infrastructure or platform engineering experience
• Minimum 5 years focused on:
• Observability
• Performance Engineering
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Hands-on experience with enterprise observability platforms including:
• Datadog (strongly preferred)
• Dynatrace
• New Relic
• Splunk Observability
• Grafana/Prometheus
• Expertise with:
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
• Distributed tracing
• OpenTelemetry
• Continuous profiling
• Service dependency mapping
• Experience instrumenting applications using:
• Java
• .NET
• Python
• Node.js
• Go
• Experience with:
• Microsoft Azure
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Hybrid cloud environments
• Experience monitoring:
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• Container platforms
• Experience with:
• SQL performance tuning
• Database monitoring
• Query analytics
• Execution plans
• Experience integrating observability with:
• ServiceNow
• CI/CD pipelines
• DevOps workflows
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code using:
• Terraform
• ARM Templates
• Bicep
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and performance optimization skills

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience supporting federal government environments
• Experience leading enterprise observability strategy
• Experience with enterprise operational dashboards and executive reporting
• Experience supporting 24x7x365 production environments
• Advanced knowledge of cloud-native monitoring and telemetry governance

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in:
• Computer Science
• Information Technology
• Engineering
• Related technical field
• Minimum 8 years of relevant infrastructure/platform engineering experience
• Minimum 5 years specializing in observability, SRE, or performance engineering
• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance
• U.S. Citizenship required (No Dual Citizenship)

About the Team / Company

This role supports the SEC Infrastructure Support Services (ISS) contract, providing senior technical leadership for enterprise observability across hybrid cloud, containerized, and on-premises environments. The engineer will collaborate with cloud, platform, and application teams to improve system reliability, operational visibility, and performance while supporting mission-critical SEC infrastructure.

Benefits (employee contribution):