Senior Software Engineer - Agent Metric Pipelines

The Datadog Agent collects and transmits application and host telemetry, which powers many Datadog products such as Infrastructure Monitoring, Logs, APM, and Database Monitoring. This software runs on customer infrastructure across various platforms, collecting and receiving telemetry that is then forwarded to Datadog for analysis. This process provides customers with deep insights into their systems and performance data.

The Agent Metric Pipelines team’s mission is to collect and forward metrics reliably with the smallest possible overhead and simplest possible configuration. They own the Agent code that receives metrics, processes them, and forwards them into Datadog’s metrics intake and platform so everything downstream (indexing, aggregation, alerting, graphs) can work correctly and at scale. Additionally, they own the client libraries for publishing custom metrics to the Agent from a variety of languages (including Go, Java, C#, and others).

At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships that it builds, the creativity it brings to the table, and the collaboration of being together. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our employees can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.

What You’ll Do: 

• Design and implement high-performance, resource-efficient data pipelines for collecting, aggregating, and shipping metrics from the Datadog Agent to backend systems
• Profile and optimize code for CPU, memory, and network efficiency to ensure smooth operation in resource-constrained, on-prem environments where agents run on customer hosts
• Ensure data correctness, compression efficiency, and overall quality across the telemetry pipeline, including deduplication, tagging, and metric typing
• Collaborate on performance analysis and tuning, improving reliability, latency, and throughput across large-scale ingestion systems
• Partner with other teams to support new telemetry formats, gRPC/UDP data paths, and OpenTelemetry integration
• Contribute to operational excellence, including monitoring, debugging, and on-call rotations, ensuring low latency and high data delivery success rates
• Write clean, maintainable code in Go and Rust, and help evolve the Agent ecosystem to support new workloads and environments

Who You Are: 

• You have more than 8-10 years of experience in systems or distributed programming (Go, Rust, C++, Java, or similar)
• You have worked on Agent-like software or other software deployed on-prem
• You have experience in data pipeline processing, compression techniques, or telemetry transport protocols (e.g., gRPC, UDP, message batching)
• You are skilled in performance profiling and optimization—you think in terms of CPU cycles, memory footprints, and bandwidth efficiency
• You understand Linux internals and low-level OS concepts, and are familiar with Kubernetes or containerized deployment workflows
• You are open to working in Go and Rust, and interested in OpenTelemetry and observability systems
• You value reliability, observability, and craftsmanship in production software, and thrive in collaborative, cross-functional engineering environments.
• 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:

• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP).
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing.
• Intradepartmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking.
• An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups).
• Access to Inclusion Talks, our internal panel discussions.
• Free, global mental health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+.
• Competitive global benefits.

Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.