Software Engineer II - Risk Engineering

Datadog is hiring a Software Engineer II to strengthen our Risk Engineering program. In this role, you will help design and build AI-powered systems that transform how we manage risk at scale, delivering practical solutions that thoughtfully balance compliance, security, and business objectives. Reporting to the Engineering Manager, you will play a key role in scaling Datadog’s risk management capabilities, driving high-impact engineering outcomes, and evolving our approach to meet emerging technologies and AI-driven workflows.

This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, LLM systems, and risk automation. You’ll work primarily in Go while building and operationalizing AI-driven tooling centered around large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, structured data pipelines, and intelligent risk workflows. This is not a traditional backend role, we’re looking for an engineer excited about rapid prototyping, experimenting with LLM capabilities, and turning those experiments into production-grade systems that improve risk visibility and decision-making.

What You’ll Do:

• Develop Go-based services that integrate with LLMs to automate and augment risk workflows.

• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping, iteration, and implementation.

• Design and implement prompt architectures for risk classification, control mapping, exception analysis, and policy interpretation.

• Build structured evaluation frameworks to measure LLM quality, hallucination rates, determinism, and decision accuracy.

• Implement automation for risk management workflows, including triage, remediation tracking, exception handling, and integrations with internal systems, to improve scalability of the program.

• Build evaluation loops to continuously improve prompt performance and model outputs.

• Design schemas and structured data models for risk registers, control libraries, policy exceptions, and evidence artifacts.

• Improve traceability between risks, controls, policies, and exceptions using intelligent automation.

Who You Are:

• You have 2+ years of experience in software engineering, building and operating production systems at scale, including deploying, managing, and troubleshooting services in Kubernetes environments.

• You have hands-on experience with a modern programming language (ideally Go and Python).

• You actively use AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot) and are comfortable building systems.

• Comfort experimenting with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and building AI-powered tools.

• Experience working with APIs and distributed systems.

• Demonstrated ability to independently break down complex problems, drive solutions, and execute with minimal supervision.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate technical concepts through RFCs, design documents, and architectural diagrams.

• Curiosity about AI systems and their limitations, including an understanding of failure modes such as hallucination, non-determinism, and prompt brittleness.

• Solid foundation in software development best practices, including code quality, testing methodologies, and maintainable, scalable system design.

• Self-motivated and able to take initiative in building programs that scale impact across the organization.

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:
$149,000—$190,000 USD

About Datadog:

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. 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.

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