What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Software Engineer - Watchdog Anomaly Detection position at Datadog?
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.