Datadog SME

Project overview

The Role

Please include a brief outline of the impact this role will have, including overview of customer industry and projects, access to cutting-edge technology etc. Do NOT include customer name.

Architecture & Design: Define enterprise observability standards, topologies, and frameworks across infrastructure, microservices, and hybrid cloud environments.

Platform Implementation: Hands-on deployment of Datadog suites including APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, Logs, RUM, Synthetics, and Database Monitoring (DBM).

Reliability & SLOs: Establish Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and error budgets to drive root-cause analysis and minimize MTTR

Cost & Pipeline Optimization: Manage log and observability pipelines (routing, filtering) and optimize data ingestion, indexing, and retention costs.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Manage and provision Datadog monitors, dashboards, and configurations via Terraform or OpenTofu.

Collaboration & Leadership: Mentor engineering pods on Open Telemetry standards, SRE telemetry best practices, and CI/CD tool integrations.

Responsibilities

(Up to 10, Avoid repetition)

Experience: 10+ years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, or SystemsArchitecture, with at least 3+ years specializing deeply in Datadog administration and configuration.

Cloud & Container Expertise: Deep professional experience working with AWS, Azure, or GCP, paired with heavy production experience managing Kubernetes clusters.

Instrumentation & Coding: Proficiency in systems or Scripting languages (eg, Python, Go, Bash, or JavaScript) and experience instrumenting applications for APM.

Datadog Mastery: Deep understanding of Datadog's core pillars-Infrastructure, APM, Logs, Metrics, Synthetics, and Security Monitoring. Datadog Certifications are a strong plus.

Problem-Solving Mindset: Demonstrated ability to debug complex, distributed microservices architectures under high-pressure incident response scenarios.

Communication Skills: Excellent interpersonal and stakeholder management skills, with the ability totranslate technical telemetry data into actionable business and engineering insights.

Requirements

Essential skills/knowledge/experience: (Up to 10, Avoid repetition)

Experience: 10+ years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, or SystemsArchitecture, with at least 3+ years specializing deeply in Datadog administration and configuration.

Cloud & Container Expertise: Deep professional experience working with AWS, Azure, or GCP, paired with heavy production experience managing Kubernetes clusters.

Instrumentation & Coding: Proficiency in systems or Scripting languages (eg, Python, Go, Bash, or JavaScript) and experience instrumenting applications for APM.

Datadog Mastery: Deep understanding of Datadog's core pillars-Infrastructure, APM, Logs, Metrics, Synthetics, and Security Monitoring. Datadog Certifications are a strong plus.

Problem-Solving Mindset: Demonstrated ability to debug complex, distributed microservices architectures under high-pressure incident response scenarios.

Communication Skills: Excellent interpersonal and stakeholder management skills, with the ability totranslate technical telemetry data into actionable business and engineering insights.

Desirable skills/knowledge/experience: (As applicable)

Architecture & Implementation Platform Ownership: Design, deploy, and manage Datadog agents, integrations, and custom metrics across multi-cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containerized (Kubernetes, Docker) environments.

Observability Pipelines: Architect and scale high-throughput log processing, routing, and transformation systems using Datadog.

APM & Infrastructure Monitoring: Configure and optimize Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Distributed Tracing, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and Infrastructure metrics.

Governance & Best Practices Standardization: Establish company-wide standards for dashboards, monitors, SLOs/SLIs, and alert routing (integrating with PagerDuty, Jira, Opsgenie, etc.).

Cost & Performance Optimization: Audit and optimize Datadog usage, index management, log retention policies, and custom metric volume to maximize ROI and control licensing costs.

Security & Compliance: Leverage Datadog Security products (CSPM, CWPP, Cloud SIEM, Container Security) to maintain compliance postures and mitigate runtime threats.

Collaboration & Enablement Cross-Functional Mentorship: Act as the go-to escalation point and technical mentor for DevOps, SRE, and Software Engineering teams regarding troubleshooting and instrumentation.

Training & Documentation: Create internal documentation, runbooks, and training modules to elevate organizational proficiency in observability.

Vendor Management: Act as the primary technical point of contact for Datadog account teams, evaluating beta features, roadmap items, and handling complex support escalations.

Project details

• Start: flexible
• Location: York, UK, GB