Kafka is mission critical at Datadog—used for sending data in near real-time between a vast majority of our services. The Streaming Platform team is responsible for operating the Kafka fleet and building abstractions on top of it so that companies and engineers across the world continue to trust Datadog functionality and metrics.
The Streaming Platform team’s goals are reliability, cost efficiency, and usability for our customers. We support several dozen internal customers, with petabytes of storage and hundreds of millions of messages and MiB per second flowing through our infrastructure. At this scale, first-class reliability is an exciting challenge, meaningful cost optimizations can result from clever improvements, and excellent customer satisfaction requires an emphasis on safe automation.
Our team is looking for a Senior Software engineer to help us scale and continue improving our kafka fleet. In this position, you’ll regularly interact with our users, dig deep into open source solutions to understand behavior, and build necessary tooling and enhancements to keep kafka running smoothly and efficiently for our customers.
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:
- Operate a bleeding edge Kafka deployment with exceptional reliability by deeply understanding foundational hardware and cloud-provider building blocks, incident root causes, and performance profiles through detail-oriented investigations.
- Develop a high-performance streaming platform composed of our control and data planes to ease customer adoption and reduce operational burden.
- Integrate open source solutions with internal systems to operate kafka efficiently.
- Tweak low-level kafka client behavior to optimize high-throughput application performance.
- Drive complex projects and be accountable for timely delivery and high quality results.
- Mentor junior team members and interns.
Who You Are:
- Someone who can operate independently, methodically experiment, rapidly iterate, and has no fear of failure.
- Possess good communications skills, have experience gathering requirements from stakeholders and leading complex technical initiatives.
- Someone with a willingness to learn new languages and technologies, diving deep into runtimes and ecosystems.
- Experienced at delivering software solutions and libraries in Java or Golang.
- Experience building/operating large scale stateful systems
- Familiar with distributed systems concepts such as consensus, quorums, and replication
- Bonus Points: Direct experience operating or using large-scale streaming systems like Kafka
- Bonus Points: Familiarity with C++ or Rust
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.
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.
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.
Skills Required
- Deliver software solutions and libraries in Java or Golang
- Experience building and operating large-scale stateful systems
- Familiarity with distributed systems concepts (consensus, quorums, replication)
- Operate Kafka deployments including incident root cause analysis and performance profiling
- Tweak low-level Kafka client behavior to optimize high-throughput application performance
- Strong communication skills; experience gathering requirements and leading technical initiatives
- Willingness to learn new languages and dive into runtimes and ecosystems
- Mentor junior team members and interns
- Direct experience operating or using large-scale streaming systems like Kafka
- Familiarity with C++ or Rust
Datadog Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage paired with dedicated mental‑health access (including free annual sessions for employees and dependents) and gender‑affirming care indicates robust healthcare support. Fitness reimbursements further reinforce preventative wellness.
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Parental & Family Support — Fully paid, gender‑neutral parental leave alongside family‑forming support (adoption, fertility, preservation, surrogacy) and childcare assistance shows strong backing for growing families. Pet‑related assistance in eligible offices expands family‑oriented offerings.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — An employee stock purchase plan with a discount and RSUs for many roles broaden access to ownership. This equity mix enhances total rewards beyond base pay.
Datadog Insights
What We Do
Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) is a global SaaS business, delivering a rare combination of growth and profitability. We are on a mission to break down silos and solve complexity in the cloud age by enabling digital transformation, cloud migration, and infrastructure monitoring of our customers' entire technology stacks. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries. Together, we champion professional development, diversity of thought, innovation, and work excellence to empower continuous growth. Join the pack and become part of a collaborative, pragmatic, and thoughtful people-first community where we solve tough problems, take smart risks, and celebrate one another.
Why Work With Us
At Datadog, we learn from and celebrate each other daily - each win is a team win. Datadogs solve tough problems, innovate pragmatically, and grow together. We promote from within, provide mentorship and opportunities for career development, and support our colleagues in the process. Best of all? We truly love what we do.
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Datadog Offices
Hybrid Workspace
Employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work.
We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them and their team.


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