Staff Software Engineer - Query Experience

About Datadog

We're on a mission to build the best observability platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale - trillions of data points per day - providing always-on alerting, metrics visualization, logs, and application tracing for tens of thousands of companies. Our engineering culture values pragmatism, honesty, and simplicity to solve hard problems the right way.

The Opportunity

Query Experience is the organization responsible for defining and delivering the unified interface through which all internal and external users query and interact with data at Datadog.

We build the APIs, planning layers, semantic infrastructure, and UI platforms that power querying across all telemetry data types—metrics, logs, traces, events, and more. Our work spans developer experience, natural language interfaces, schema-aware querying, and intelligent access patterns. Together, we support hundreds of engineers, countless dashboards, AI agents, monitors, and backend systems across Datadog.

Datadog is building the next generation of federated query systems, enabling:

• Cross-org & cross-region querying for exec dashboards and incident response

• Federated search into customer-managed stores

• Data sovereignty–aware federation, where sensitive fields are controlled

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:

• Lead design of the query planner that splits, dispatches, and joins queries across orgs, regions, and customer stores

• Architect and implement the service to transmit plans and data securely across Datadog regions and customer space

• Define and enforce data sovereignty policies

• Collaborate with product teams to bring this into dashboards, monitors, SOC workflows, and executive KPIs.

Who You Are:

• You have a BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equivalent experience

• You have 10+ years of relevant engineering experience, and experience acting as a technical lead

• You have experience with query federation, distributed joins/unions, and multi-source query execution (e.g., Substrait, Trino, DataFusion, Calcite, Presto).

• You have a strong grasp of query optimization under constraints like cost, latency, and partial pushdowns

• You are excited to work cross-functionally to build alignment

• You’re excited about leveraging AI tools to enhance how you code, solve problems, and build – or eager to learn how

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:

• Get to build tools for software engineers, just like yourself. And use the tools we build to accelerate our development.

• Have a lot of influence on product direction and impact on the business

• Work with skilled, knowledgeable, and kind teammates who are happy to teach and learn

• Competitive global benefits

• Continuous professional development

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.

The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is:
$234,000—$300,000 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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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.