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Salary: USD 192,000 - 240,000 / annual
Datadog is seeking a Founding Engineering Lead for its Datadog for Startups (DDFS) program, a strategic initiative to help fast-scaling early-stage companies adopt observability and security best practices from inception. You will be the first technical hire on a lean five-person team, owning the complete technical motion end-to-end.
Key responsibilities include running discovery calls with startup CTOs and engineering leaders to identify technical needs and position Datadog against competitors like Grafana, New Relic, Sentry, and Clickhouse. You'll deliver customized demos, guide technical onboarding, and help startups get instrumented quickly—with particular focus on AI/ML observability, infrastructure scaling, and security. Beyond customer-facing work, you'll build internal automation to streamline outreach, reporting, the application process, and website updates.
You'll represent Datadog at accelerator demo days, hackathons, conferences, founder dinners, and workshops across San Francisco, building relationships across the startup ecosystem—founders, VCs, accelerator partners, and technical communities. You'll develop thought leadership content for technical founder audiences and serve as a trusted technical advisor.
This is not a traditional solutions engineer role. It blends solutions architecture, technical consulting, startup evangelism, and business development. You'll need to be adaptable, proactive, and comfortable taking initiative in ambiguous situations on a small team.
Required: 5–7+ years in solutions architecture, pre-sales engineering, technical consulting, or similar customer-facing technical roles at SaaS or cloud companies. You must have broad fluency in cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and modern application frameworks. You should be a genuine tinkerer with personal interest in AI and emerging technologies—someone who uses Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and follows agentic workflows and codegen because you find it interesting.
You have a consultative mindset, strong presence, and communication skills to command a room of technical founders and hold your own in unscripted conversations with CTOs. You're based in San Francisco and actively engaged in the local tech and startup community. Startup experience—founding a company, early-stage engineering, or advisory work—is strongly preferred.
