Manager I, Engineering - AI Platform - Evaluation & Annotation

Datadog

Applied AI is where Datadog's ambitious AI bets get built and shipped (Bits Chat, updog). We sit at the intersection of research and product: turning promising capabilities from Datadog AI Research lab and the research community into production systems that reach real customers. The team builds specialized models that replace frontier models where they are not necessary, making AI capabilities faster, cheaper, and more secure. The mandate is to move fast from idea to customer impact, and when a product finds its footing, to set it up for growth.   As a Manager I in Applied AI, you will lead a team of engineers and applied scientists working on one of these challenges. You will define technical direction, run short feedback loops, make deliberate decisions about what to pursue or stop, and work closely with product managers, research teams, and cross-functional partners to ship AI capabilities that matter.   At Datadog, we place value in our office culture, the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings. 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 and develop a team of engineers and applied scientists focused on cost-efficient specialized models and AI security capabilities * Work closely with product managers, research teams, and cross-functional partners to shape the team's bets from initial framing through to broader adoption, with a clear definition of success criteria at each stage * Own end-to-end delivery of high-quality AI systems, from early research exploration to production-grade reliability, with high standards for operational excellence, system reliability, and technical quality * Navigate the unique challenges of shipping AI-powered products: balancing quality, latency, cost, and safety considerations. Drive evaluation and iteration practices for AI systems: define the quality bar and guide the team in building the offline and online evaluation pipelines needed to measure quality and detect drift * Contribute to cross-team collaboration and knowledge sharing across the broader AI organization * Support career growth for engineers through coaching, feedback, and fostering a culture of experimentation, innovation, and learning. Participate in hiring and help shape the future team as the organization grows Who You Are * A people-focused manager with experience leading and mentoring engineers, able to develop strong engineering talent in a fast-moving domain * A technical leader with deep expertise in one or more areas of AI or machine learning: large language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, agentic systems, deep learning, or NLP * Well-versed in evaluation methodologies for AI systems, both offline benchmarks and online metrics * A strong product instinct: able to anchor early-stage work in concrete customer problems, define success criteria before writing code, and actively contribute to shaping product direction alongside product and research partners * Experience taking AI products from 0 to 1 is strongly valued: able to bring structure to early-stage work by scoping clear hypotheses, moving quickly toward signal, and making deliberate decisions about what to pursue, pivot, or stop * BS/MS/PhD in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent professional experience #LI-Hybrid ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.

Datadog

The AI platform is responsible for all AI infrastructure across Datadog. Our mission is to provide tools and platforms that enable data scientists and engineers to conduct large-scale training and inference with ease. We support products such as Bits AI, LLMObs and all our AI research.  As an engineering manager for the Training & Serving team, you’ll join a new and fast growing team and organization. You will support building and scaling the team, define our technical vision and help shape the roadmap. Your team will lead the charge on multiple critical technical challenges: distributed training of foundation models, serving at scale, designing the user experience.  You’ll work closely with sister teams in the AI platform organization ensuring a seamless AI development cycle. You’ll also partner with the Applied AI org and with Datadog infrastructure & tooling teams to build out systems from the ground up.  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:  * Manage and grow the Training & Serving team, directly managing 10+ engineers * Define our technical roadmap in alignment with AI platform goals and the Applied AI team roadmap.  * Work with our core platform teams to tailor Datadog's storage, infrastructure and data pipelines to our needs * Create a strong team culture aligned with our engineering standards and our customer focus * Participate in hands-on work: Code reviews, design reviews and some coding   Who You Are:  * Previous experience (1+ years) leading software engineering teams, as a tech lead or people manager * Strong technician with a mix of backend, data engineer and infrastructure experience who is interested in remaining a hands-on leader * Excellent leader with strong interpersonal skills, and the ability to build and lead high-performing teams * Interested in working on an early stage project with many challenges to solve and a fast iteration cycle * You build strong partnerships with cross-functional teams, including engineering, product, and science, and skillfully coordinate among multiple stakeholders * You have a track record of delivering high-quality software on schedule and making decisions in ambiguous and fast-paced environments * You have demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day-to-day workflows and validate, critique, and refine AI-generated output * Bonus: You’re motivated to push the boundaries of how AI can improve software engineering best practices and contribute to building AI-enabled products 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 #LI-Hybrid ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.

Datadog

Source Code Integration enables Product teams at Datadog to develop features that leverage our customers’ source code. This brings the platform closer to developers, as it helps them relate their telemetry to code to run automated investigations, debug their services with stack traces and profiles, scan their code for security issues, or make proactive fixes, among others. The team owns all the platform services, infrastructure and integrations required to access and synchronize our customer repositories in a secure, reliable and efficient manner. We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to drive the growth of our platform, as Datadog shifts left and becomes more developer-friendly and AI-ready. In this role you will lead the growth of our platform to support an increasing number of high profile features and teams, and work with a team of engineers of varied experience levels to shape our roadmap and deliver impactful solutions at scale. 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:  * Lead and cultivate a team of engineers of diverse experience levels, including performance management and career development * Lead technical and strategical discussions to better understand the challenges and opportunities faced by our team and our stakeholders * Own and drive the relationships with product teams and major stakeholders, balancing competing requests with long term investments, and prioritizing impact across the whole platform * Run a lightweight process to pace and track what we work on. Support the progressive delivery of high quality work through demos and frequent iteration  * Stay in touch with your team’s systems, and roll up your sleeves when needed to unblock your team by writing code or troubleshooting issues * Support both internal and external customers resolve their issues, and find systematic solutions that elevate our platform and integration experience   What we’re looking for:  * A good collaborator, an enabler, a natural leader that puts people first * A backend engineer at heart, with experience building robust systems composed of multiple services, data streams and stores operating at scale * Significant experience with major backend technologies (e.g. Go, Python, or Java, PostgreSQL, Kafka), event driven architecture and or distributed systems * Experience running platform services, comfortable making tradeoffs and balancing short term impact with long term sustainability. Proven ability to work closely with product and internal teams to deliver solutions at scale * Passion to work in a fast-paced, high-growth environment providing leadership and direction for a highly technical team * Positivity and proactivity towards AI. Experience using agentic tools for development and analysis 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:  * High income earning opportunities based on individual performance * New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) * Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing * Sales training in MEDDIC and Command of the Message * 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 Spring Health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+ * Competitive global benefits * Giving programs Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog. #LI-Onsite ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.