Datadog SME

Project overview

The Role: Datadog SME

Requirements

Essential skills/knowledge/experience:

Desirable skills/knowledge/experience:

If this position is of interest to you, apply now!

• Experience: 10+ years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, or Systems Architecture, with at least 3+ years specialising 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 (e.g., 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 to translate technical telemetry data into actionable business and engineering insights.
• Architecture & Implementation
• Platform Ownership: Design, deploy, and manage Datadog agents, integrations, and custom metrics
• across multi-cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containerised (Kubernetes, Docker) environments.
• Observability Pipelines: Architect and scale high-throughput log processing, routing, and transformation
• systems using Datadog.
• APM & Infrastructure Monitoring: Configure and optimise Application Performance Monitoring (APM),
• Distributed Tracing, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and Infrastructure metrics.
• Governance & Best Practices
• Standardisation: Establish company-wide standards for dashboards, monitors, SLOs/SLIs, and alert
• routing (integrating with PagerDuty, Jira, Opsgenie, etc.).
• Cost & Performance Optimisation: Audit and optimize Datadog usage, index management, log
• retention policies, and custom metric volume to maximise 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 organisational 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

York, UK

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: 3 Days Onsite in a week

• Start: flexible
• Remote: remote
• Location: York, GB