What Career Growth Looks Like at Datadog: Mentorship, Clear Promotion Paths and Internal Mobility

At Datadog, a monitoring and security platform for developers and IT teams, no one’s career development is left to chance. Tech veterans and early-career employees alike can expect ample opportunities to grow, learn and collaborate.

Just ask Abdulkader Abousaleh, the regional vice president of enterprise sales for the Middle East and Africa. After joining Datadog as a regional director in 2023, Abousaleh was tasked with overseeing the company’s expansion in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and South Africa over the course of three years.

But around the two-year mark, Abousaleh said they hit an inflection point.

“The team grew faster than one regional director could manage, and it became clear the team needed a VP leader,” he said.

At first, Abousaleh wasn’t sure he wanted the position; he loved being close to the field and involved in the nitty-gritty side of business deals. But with his employer’s support, Abousaleh felt empowered to make the leap.

“I came here because I wanted to create something from the ground up, and that's exactly what this role allows,” Abousaleh said.

Now, Abousaleh gets to be challenged as a strategic leader for a fast-growing region while still staying close to the team he built. The opportunity, much like Datadog’s unique position as a large-cap company with an entrepreneurial mindset, is what Abousaleh calls “the best of both worlds.”

And he’s far from alone in feeling that way.

Built In spoke with Abousaleh and two teammates who have all experienced career development since joining Datadog. The three employees credited their growth to a blend of structured career frameworks, communicative managers, and a culture of continuous learning and collaboration that set them up for long-term success.

 

Datadog Employees Who Have Grown Their Careers

Sébastien Haentjens, a senior software engineer, has worked on six different teams since joining Datadog six years ago. 

“The work is never static here; as our technology scales, so do our challenges,” Haentjens said.

Haentjens’ career at Datadog began through a New York City internship in 2019, where he was introduced to data engineering, a field he hadn’t studied but immediately fell in love with. In the last five years working in internal analytics, Haentjens has grown through internal moves and two promotions.

Currently, his team is focused on AI use cases, an area of ever-shifting technology that Haentjens and his peers find exciting.

“Datadog is always evolving, which means you never run out of new problems to solve,” Haentjens said. “It’s an exciting place to build a career because the landscape changes just enough to keep you challenged.” 

Jacqueline Tan, an enterprise account executive based in Singapore, is another employee who can attest to the career development opportunities at Datadog. Unlike Haentjens, Tan’s path to her current role in enterprise sales was anything but linear. But at Datadog, employees with diverse backgrounds and skill sets are welcome. 

 

How Datadog Supports Career Growth for Employees With Diverse Backgrounds

Tan first came across Datadog as an agency recruiter.

“I was actually prospecting them as a potential client,” Tan said. Datadog had just entered the Association of Southeast Asian Nations market and was scaling quickly, which caught her attention.

“I reached out to someone in the team and instead of bringing me on as a vendor, she turned the conversation around and asked if I’d consider applying for a commercial account executive role,” Tan said.

Like Abousaleh, at first Tan wasn’t sure. She’d never worked in tech sales. Imposter syndrome crept in. But with encouragement from her Datadog contact, Tan went for the sales role, and ultimately, landed it.

Since then, Tan has advanced from individual contributor to a commercial leadership role, where she has opened markets in India, Thailand and Indonesia. 

“I’ve now taken on a new challenge this year by transitioning from commercial to a new strategic IC role in enterprise sales,” she added.

While Tan’s entry point into enterprise sales may have been atypical, she always felt supported by managers and a culture of growth grounded in internal mobility and structured career development. 

“Leaders act as sponsors, but individuals are expected to own their progression, with regular check-ins, measurable milestones and stretch assignments to build both skills and visibility,” Tan said.

 

How Datadog Supports Employee Growth Through Career Paths, Manager Support and Learning

According to Haentjens, employee growth at Datadog can be boiled down to three things: transparent conversation, clear guidelines and human support. 

“We have very clearly defined career paths with objective milestones, which makes it easy to align with your manager on exactly what is needed to reach the next level,” Haentjens said.

For every promotion Haentjens has earned — from software engineer to software engineer II to senior software engineer — he worked with his manager to build the roadmap for his next promotion. Engineering teams use a ‘promotion document’ — a living file that they update regularly with projects Haentjens has delivered and the skills he has acquired, and then identify the specific gaps he needs to close to reach the next level. 

Beyond the structure and managerial support, Haentjens said the environment itself accelerates growth. 

“Datadog encourages curiosity and 'low ego' collaboration,” Haentjens said. The widespread culture of learning and collaboration isn’t just nice to have. Haentjens said it’s necessary for the speed at which Datadog operates.

“Our tech stacks evolve year over year,” Haentjens said. To stay effective, he spends a lot of time researching emerging trends in the field and making suggestions when he finds a technology he believes is worth investing in. 

Take Airbyte, for example.

“I identified it as a solution, performed the external benchmarking to prove its value and eventually led the migration for the team,” he said. 

The stretch project allowed Haentjens to take ownership of a major infrastructure decision and reinforced how Datadog rewards curiosity, exploration and ownership. And now, Haentjens is ready to give back to more junior engineers by participating in the same internal mentorship program that helped him grow over the last six years. 

“While the formal career ladders are key to career progression, one of my favorite parts of working at Datadog is the access to colleagues at all levels of the organization,” Haentjens said.  “You have the opportunity to learn from smart, humble experts who are collaborative and willing to share their knowledge. That informal knowledge transfer is just as valuable as the formal training.” 

Even though Haentjens has worked at Datadog for six years, he still feels like there is room to grow and learn. He recently participated in an “Embed” program that allows engineers to join a different team temporarily to solve a specific problem. Haentjens helped build a system to give data scientists access to Datadog's data stores — a “massive” opportunity that exposed the senior software engineer to new stakeholders, new agile workflows and feedback from people with different areas of expertise. 

Haentjens is now focused on a large-scale migration onto a new data catalog, where he will be heavily involved in refining the user experience. This project represents a new challenge because of the sheer scale of the user base and will require a new level of architectural and product thinking. But even with continuous challenges ahead, Haentjens said he feels energized rather than burned out.

“What I appreciate most is that Datadog is a people-centered organization that invests in its employees for the long-term,” Haentjens said. “It proves that you can work in a high-growth, high-performance tech environment without sacrificing your personal life.” 

  

Frequently Asked Questions