Senior Developer Advocate - Data Observability

About the Role

As a Senior Developer Advocate focusing on Data Observability, you will be a technical leader and mentor, owning projects from inception to completion. You'll facilitate collaboration and empower Datadog's community of engineers to build better software by becoming a subject matter expert and an influential voice in the data engineering and observability landscape.

What You’ll Do

• Act as a subject matter expert for data observability on behalf of Datadog's advocacy and engineering teams.
• Create content across various mediums (demos, talks, blogs, documentation, webinars, open source, research) to establish Datadog as a leader in data engineering and observability.
• Partner with and coach internal product and customer engineering teams on effective public communication and presentations.
• Contribute to product development through feedback on bugs and suggestions for enhancements.
• Identify and pursue opportunities for events, programs, and community engagement to build trust with practitioners.

Who You Are

You are a trusted technical expert who enjoys helping data practitioners understand, operate, and improve complex data systems in production. You bring deep, hands-on experience in modern data engineering, providing clear context to both the community and internal teams. You are expected to have depth in some areas and familiarity across many, connecting them into a coherent operational story.

Technical Expertise Areas

• Data Engineering & Processing Systems: Experience building, operating, or supporting production data pipelines using distributed systems like Apache Spark or Databricks, understanding common failure modes and performance tradeoffs.
• Data Platforms & Analytics Systems: Hands-on experience with analytics platforms such as Snowflake and BigQuery, including schema design, data modeling, SQL analysis, and considerations for performance and cost.
• Streaming & Event-Driven Data: Understanding of streaming systems like Kafka, including producer/consumer behavior, lag, and issue propagation.
• Data Quality, Lineage, and Metadata: Familiarity with concepts of data quality, impact analysis, and change management, with experience in tooling like dbt or OpenLineage.
• Programming & Querying: Proficiency in at least one data systems programming language (Python, Scala, Java, Go) and strong SQL skills.

Additional Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience as a software developer, data engineer, SRE, or similar practitioner.
• 3+ years of experience in advocacy, developer relations, or equivalent audience engagement through content and presentations.
• Publicly available writing samples, demos, repositories, or presentation recordings.
• Familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure and container-based systems.
• Strong interest in self-directed learning and exploring new technologies.

Bonus Points

• Experience supporting data pipelines for ML or AI systems.
• Meaningful contributions to open source or shared technical tooling.

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We encourage you to apply if you are passionate about technology and eager to grow your skills, even if you don't meet every qualification.

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.
• Inclusive company culture with 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.

Note: Benefits and Growth may vary based on country of employment and employment nature.

Salary Range

$194,000 - $237,000 USD