Senior Software Engineer - Streaming Platform (NORAM)

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.