Manager II, Engineering - Data Semantics

The Data Semantics team builds the foundation that makes Datadog’s data usable, discoverable, and intelligent. We define and maintain the shared data model that connects petabytes of raw telemetry—metrics, traces, logs, profiles, and cloud resources—to logical datasets, fields, and relationships. This semantic layer ensures that data from different sources can be understood and queried consistently, whether a customer is building dashboards, creating monitors, exploring data, or using AI-assisted workflows.

Our work directly accelerates product teams. By providing a unified schema layer and standardized mappings between OpenTelemetry and Datadog-native data, we remove duplication across ingestion, storage, and query paths. Product teams can build on a common model instead of recreating metadata pipelines or custom field logic. As we expand dataset coverage, improve field-level metadata, and strengthen dataset relationships, we enable faster feature delivery, safer migrations, better cross-product experiences, and more reliable enterprise use cases. We also lay the groundwork for advanced capabilities such as intelligent autocomplete, semantic search, and AI-powered data exploration.

As Datadog scales—across new data sources, new regions, enterprise customers, and AI initiatives—the semantic platform must scale with it. We need an Engineering Manager who can drive product value while building durable, self-service systems that other teams can depend on. This leader will partner closely with product and engineering to prioritize high-impact initiatives - enable new AI-native capabilities and deliver on cross-organisational OpenTelemetry and schema milestones. At the same time, they will grow a high-performing distributed team, strengthen execution, and ensure our data foundation can support the next wave of Datadog innovation.

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:

• Lead and scale a high performing team of 8 engineers by fostering leadership and strengthening technical ownership


• Drive the technical roadmap for the Data Semantics platform, aligning near-term deliverables with long-term strategic goals across observability, OpenTelemetry, and AI-driven use cases.


• Expand the mandate to support broader engineering initiatives, driving cross-team scope that has outsized impact on platform capabilities, product velocity, and customer experience.


• Act as a strong technical leader: participate in on-call rotations, engage directly with complex technical challenges, bias toward action, and lead architectural decisions for distributed, high-throughput, real-time systems while empowering and growing other technical leaders on the team.


• Contribute to engineering-wide initiatives as a member of Datadog’s engineering management team, helping shape standards, execution discipline, and long-term platform direction across the organization.

Who You Are:

• You have a strong track record of leading engineering teams to deliver high-impact outcomes, setting clear expectations, maintaining a high bar for quality, and supporting team members to grow and improve.


• You know how to grow senior engineers and emerging leaders, building technical ownership and leadership capacity


• You are a strong technical leader with a deep engineering foundation in backend or platform systems, ideally in data-intensive or distributed environments, and you bring a proven focus on building reliable, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems.


• You have driven cross-team initiatives that required alignment across multiple stakeholders and delivered impact beyond your immediate team.


• You are an excellent communicator, comfortable engaging with engineers, product partners, and senior leadership, and able to turn complex technical topics into clear decisions and direction.


• You bring a product-oriented mindset and can define and execute a roadmap that connects platform investments to customer value and broader business priorities.

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.