Datadog for Startups Founding Engineering Lead

Datadog

Datadog is seeking a highly motivated Senior Corporate Development Lead to drive our AI product strategy, build strong relationships across the founder and VC ecosystem, and support high-impact initiatives including acquisitions, venture investments, and startup partnerships. You will be part of a small, high-visibility team that reports directly to Datadog’s Founder/CEO. The ideal candidate is passionate about AI and developer tools, comfortable rolling up their sleeves, and excited to operate in a fluid, technically demanding environment. You will support evaluations, source promising AI startups, collaborate closely with internal product and engineering leaders, and help position Datadog as the preferred partner for the next generation of founders. This role is ideal for someone who is hungry for increased responsibility, operates with authenticity and creativity, and prioritizes the company’s interests.   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: * Support Datadog’s AI product strategy by analyzing emerging technologies, market opportunities, and competitive dynamics. * Source high-potential AI startups for acquisition, investment, or partnership, and build a strong presence across the founder and VC ecosystem. * Attend meetups, conferences, and ecosystem events to expand Datadog’s visibility and pipeline opportunities. * Drive workstreams across diligence, valuation, financial modeling, strategic assessment, and internal recommendations. * Partner with Product and Engineering leaders to evaluate build/buy/partner opportunities aligned with Datadog’s AI roadmap. * Support negotiation processes, including term sheets and partnership structures. * Collaborate on integration planning with cross-functional partners after acquisitions or strategic deals. * Help attract early-stage AI companies into Datadog’s startup program.   Who You Are: * Demonstrated technical knowledge through past experience (software engineering, product management, VC, etc.) or a degree in Computer Science (or equivalent). * Some experience with financial modeling, forecasting, or analysis (willingness to learn; we can teach you). * Excited about building and maintaining a strong network across founders, VCs, and the broader AI ecosystem. * Self-starter who thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous, and technically challenging environments. * Excellent prioritization and ability to operate across multiple complex stakeholders and projects. * Strong communication skills and enthusiasm for developing negotiation capabilities.   Benefits and Growth: * Best-in-breed onboarding * Generous global benefits * Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking * New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) * Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing * An inclusive company culture, able to join our Community Guilds and Inclusion Talks   Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog. 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: $213,000—$312,000 USD ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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.

Meticulous

WHAT WE DO We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore - it's everything that comes after it. We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this - hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else on the market. Since then, we've grown 5x year-on-year and now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more. Companies like Dropbox, Wiz, and Notion often pay more for Meticulous than any other software product in their stack, and spontaneously refer us to others. We're backed by the same investors behind Twilio, Twitch, Intercom, and PagerDuty. Individual investors include the founders of Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox, the CTO of GitHub, the CPO of Adobe, the head of Engineering at Cursor, and many more. Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their agents write code. This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR. If this excites you, come help us build it! THE ROLE THE FIRST FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER IN SAN FRANCISCO As Meticulous's first Forward Deployed Engineer in San Francisco, you'll establish our US FDE presence and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales. You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive, you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES This role spans both customer work and engineering. You own each customer end-to-end - and do what’s needed to make sure Meticulous is transformational for them. This involves everything from changes to core product to owning the customer relationship: * Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them. * Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you’re focused on, but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts of Meticulous to work at a new level of scale required by the customer. * Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers) at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the two of you operate as a pod per account. * Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: As you see how the product performs, and how engineers workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development? Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping pair with core engineering team to make them happen. * Build the playbook: The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last, creating the leverage that lets the team scale. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR * Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ years of experience. * Highly agentic: you have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked, and get genuinely frustrated when things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive * Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives, and you're energized by customer collaboration * Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel to customer sites. Expect to spend your first ~2 months in London embedded with the core engineering team. THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF… * You want a pure IC engineering role with no customer contact * You need structured handoffs, clear specs, and a defined process to follow * You expect regular hours and no travel - our team, customers, and investors span SF, London, and NYC * You want engineering work that's insulated from customers and their problems YOU MAY LOOK LIKE… * Senior IC at a top tech company ready to leave the bureaucracy behind and own real customer outcomes end-to-end * Ex-founder or technical founding engineer who wants to keep the founder-energy but plug into a company with product-market fit and a clear path to scale * Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic looking for an earlier-stage version of the same work * Solutions architect or staff engineer who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint WHAT YOU'LL GAIN HELP BUILD A NEW FUNCTION As the first FDE in San Francisco and one of the earliest FDEs at Meticulous, you'll be instrumental in defining how this team operates, from processes and tooling to how it scales. Clear path into leadership as the function grows. EXCEPTIONAL GROWTH You grow through a combination of the people you work with, and the experiences you’re exposed to. Within that context: * Our philosophy is that density of talent is what matters; and so we’ve focused on keeping the team small but with exceptional individuals. You’ll get to collaborate with world-class engineers who previously led 100+ person organizations at top companies, and we expect you’ll find the team is beyond any you’ve worked in before, within big tech (Google, Meta, etc.) or otherwise. This, combined with a focus on learning and growing together, means we’re able to learn from each other at rapid pace. * Beyond growing your skills through engineering and collaboration, the role involves spending a lot of time with engineering leaders at the fastest growing tech companies and leading firms in the world. We’ve found this gives us a unique exposure to a huge range of technologies, practices, techniques, codebases, architectures, cultures, learnings - what works, what doesn’t. It’s a valuable bird eye view of collective learnings and experiences. These learnings normally take years or decades to build up as you move between companies. There are few startups that grow as fast as we do. You’ll be joining a small team on an exceptional trajectory. Through this comes unique growth, but also unique network. EXPAND YOUR NETWORK Our investor network is one of the most active in tech - we'll use it to connect you with whoever helps you do your job better. You’ll work with engineering leaders across many leading tech companies, often at the highest levels. Given the speed of growth, and desirability of the product amongst the leading enterprises, Meticulous provides the opportunity to build a network of connections across the full span of the technology world. SOLVE NOVEL PROBLEMS Work on challenges at the intersection of browser technology, testing infrastructure, and large-scale system design that few engineers ever encounter - to help build something that changes the way software is developed. WORLD-CLASS COMPENSATION Base salary $200K-$400K plus significant equity, exceeding compensation at top technology companies and startups. PERKS ♥️ * 🍲 Unlimited food & drinks in office - including daily lunch as a team, and your own Amazon business account to buy whatever snacks you want for the office. * 💻 A setup you’ll love - everyone has a standing desk, brand new Macbook, your choice of ergonomic peripherals, and a $2.5k WFH budget to make home just as good * 🌴 Team offsites - we work and play hard, we’ve done offsites in Italy, Abu Dhabi and local 5-star resorts * 📚 Unlimited book budget - we have a growing in-office library and actively encourage everyone to add to it, whether you want to ramp up your knowledge of software testing, or become a better startup operator! * + many more!   LIFE AT METICULOUS We believe autonomous testing will enable the automation of the majority of software development. You'll be at the forefront of this transformation, working with the companies that will be first to realize this future. This role is on-site because we've found that the speed of iteration and depth of collaboration required for both customer success and technical excellence happens best in person.

Meticulous

WHAT WE DO We're building the last piece of the puzzle to help companies unlock AI code generation - the part that makes it actually safe to ship. AI is enabling engineers to write code faster than ever before. But software review and testing hasn't caught up. Engineering leaders are drowning in long review cycles and more bugs than ever. The bottleneck isn't writing code anymore - it's everything that comes after it. We spent 3 years building the foundational technology to crack this - hard to replicate, and several years ahead of anything else on the market. Since then, we've grown 5x year-on-year and now work with some of the most AI-driven engineering teams in the world: Notion, ElevenLabs, Dropbox, Discord, LaunchDarkly, Wiz, CoreWeave, Wealthsimple, and more. Companies like Dropbox, Wiz, and Notion often pay more for Meticulous than any other software product in their stack, and spontaneously refer us to others. We're backed by the same investors behind Twilio, Twitch, Intercom, and PagerDuty. Individual investors include the founders of Vercel, Datadog, Segment, and Dropbox, the CTO of GitHub, the CPO of Adobe, the head of Engineering at Cursor, and many more. Our mission is to radically accelerate the pace of software development by empowering every engineer to ship at the speed their agents write code. This is an opportunity to join a company in hypergrowth as we scale from millions of annual recurring revenue to $100M ARR. If this excites you, come help us build it! THE ROLE FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER - LONDON As one of the first Forward Deployed Engineers at Meticulous, you'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our core engineering team at our London headquarters and help define how this function operates from the ground up. The FDE team is still small and the playbook is still being written - you'll be instrumental in shaping the processes, tooling, and best practices that the function runs on as it scales. You'll work directly with engineering leaders at the world's most AI-driven companies, understanding their unique architectures and crafting solutions that work for their specific needs. This role demands an unusual combination of deep technical expertise and entrepreneurial drive, you'll be writing high-performance code one day and presenting architectural decisions to VPs of Engineering the next. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES This role spans both customer work and engineering. You own each customer end-to-end - and do what’s needed to make sure Meticulous is transformational for them. This involves everything from changes to core product to owning the customer relationship: * Architect and deploy at scale: Work with a customer to understand their full architecture, design implementation strategies that fit their systems, and pair with their engineers to deliver them. * Evolve the core product to make the customer successful: This can range from debugging and fixing issues that are blocking the rollout (which often go deep into the core technology, such as the deterministic browser), to shipping features that will be transformative for the customer you’re focused on, but also move the product forward itself e.g. rework parts of Meticulous to work at a new level of scale required by the customer. * Own the technical relationship and lead the pilot: Be the technical lead to engineering leadership (VPs Eng, Staff+ engineers) at each customer - driving scoping, integration, and rollout. A founder or account executive handles pricing and contracts; the two of you operate as a pod per account. * Guide the direction of the product based on what you learn in the field: As you see how the product performs, and how engineers workflows are rapidly evolving, work out what do we need to build to unlock the next level of automating software development? Where there are improvements which make sense to own and ship, ship them; where the work is larger and needs deeper scoping pair with core engineering team to make them happen. * Build the playbook: The FDE function is still being defined. You'll be instrumental in establishing the processes, tooling, and best practices that make each deployment smoother and faster than the last, creating the leverage that lets the team scale. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR * Exceptional engineering skills: Typically 3+ years in a demanding technical role, but we'll consider exceptional candidates with 1+ years of experience. * Highly agentic: you have a bias to action, move fast, take ownership without being asked, and get genuinely frustrated when things stall - this role demands entrepreneurial self-drive * Strong communication skills: You can explain complex technical concepts to both engineers and executives, and you're energized by customer collaboration * Willingness to travel: Approximately 25% travel to customer sites. The majority of our enterprise customers are US-based THIS ROLE IS NOT FOR YOU IF… * You want a pure IC engineering role with no customer contact * You need structured handoffs, clear specs, and a defined process to follow * You expect regular hours and no travel - our team, customers and investors span SF, London, and NYC. The role requires comfort working across time zones * You want engineering work that's insulated from customers and their problems YOU MAY LOOK LIKE… * Senior IC at a top tech company ready to leave the bureaucracy behind and own real customer outcomes end-to-end * Ex-founder or technical founding engineer who wants to keep the founder-energy but plug into a company with product-market fit and a clear path to scale * Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenAI, Scale, or Anthropic looking for an earlier-stage version of the same work * Solutions architect or staff engineer who wants more deep engineering and less PowerPoint WHAT YOU'LL GAIN HELP BUILD A NEW FUNCTION As one of the first FDEs at Meticulous, you'll be instrumental in defining how this team operates, from processes and tooling to how it scales. Clear path into leadership as the function grows. EXCEPTIONAL GROWTH You grow through a combination of the people you work with, and the experiences you’re exposed to. Within that context: * Our philosophy is that density of talent is what matters; and so we’ve focused on keeping the team small but with exceptional individuals. You’ll get to collaborate with world-class engineers who previously led 100+ person organizations at top companies, and we expect you’ll find the team is beyond any you’ve worked in before, within big tech (Google, Meta, etc.) or otherwise. This, combined with a focus on learning and growing together, means we’re able to learn from each other at rapid pace. * Beyond growing your skills through engineering and collaboration, the role involves spending a lot of time with engineering leaders at the fastest growing tech companies and leading firms in the world. We’ve found this gives us a unique exposure to a huge range of technologies, practices, techniques, codebases, architectures, cultures, learnings - what works, what doesn’t. It’s a valuable bird eye view of collective learnings and experiences. These learnings normally take years or decades to build up as you move between companies. There are few startups that grow as fast as we do. You’ll be joining a small team on an exceptional trajectory. Through this comes unique growth, but also unique network. EXPAND YOUR NETWORK Our investor network is one of the most active in tech - we'll use it to connect you with whoever helps you do your job better. You’ll work with engineering leaders across many leading tech companies, often at the highest levels. Given the speed of growth, and desirability of the product amongst the leading enterprises, Meticulous provides the opportunity to build a network of connections across the full span of the technology world. SOLVE NOVEL PROBLEMS Work on challenges at the intersection of browser technology, testing infrastructure, and large-scale system design that few engineers ever encounter - to help build something that changes the way software is developed. WORLD-CLASS COMPENSATION Base salary £150K-£300K plus significant equity, exceeding compensation at top technology companies and startups. PERKS ♥️ * 🍲 Unlimited food & drinks in office - including daily lunch as a team, and your own Amazon business account to buy whatever snacks you want for the office. * 💻 A setup you’ll love - everyone has a standing desk, brand new Macbook, your choice of ergonomic peripherals, and a £2k WFH budget to make home just as good * 🌴 Team offsites - we work and play hard, we’ve done offsites in Italy, Abu Dhabi and local 5-star resorts * 📚 Unlimited book budget - we have a growing in-office library and actively encourage everyone to add to it, whether you want to ramp up your knowledge of software testing, or become a better startup operator! * many more! LIFE AT METICULOUS We believe autonomous testing will enable the automation of the majority of software development. You'll be at the forefront of this transformation, working with the companies that will be first to realize this future. This role is on-site because we've found that the speed of iteration and depth of collaboration required for both customer success and technical excellence happens best in person.