Engineering Manager, APM SDK Capabilities

Engineering Manager, APM SDK Capabilities at Datadog

APM is a critical part of Datadog’s observability platform, where developers understand service behavior in production. Observability begins at the edge, with telemetry generation that is consistent, reliable, and extensible across every service, language, and runtime. This is precisely where the APM SDK Capabilities team focuses its efforts.

This team is responsible for building the core infrastructure that supports all of Datadog’s tracing libraries. Their work encompasses configuration systems, startup-time validation, and extension points, along with APIs that function seamlessly across both Datadog-native and OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation. The team’s contributions enable product features across the entire APM suite, ensuring a smooth, consistent, and predictable developer experience for customers using various languages and frameworks.

As the Engineering Manager, APM SDK Capabilities, you will lead a senior, polyglot team operating at the core of Datadog’s instrumentation strategy. You will collaborate closely with APM and OpenTelemetry product teams, guiding the technical direction across multiple language SDKs. Your role will significantly influence how thousands of engineering teams onboard and scale observability using Datadog. You will also work cross-functionally with other teams to ensure that instrumentation is not only powerful but also easy to adopt and built for long-term sustainability.

Datadog is seeking an experienced engineering leader who excels at the intersection of infrastructure and developer experience. The ideal candidate cares deeply about well-designed APIs, observability-first thinking, and constructing systems that empower other developers. This is a high-leverage position that will shape how developers across the industry understand and instrument their applications. At Datadog, we value our office culture, the relationships and collaboration it fosters, and the creativity it brings. We operate as a hybrid workplace to enable our Datadogs to achieve work-life harmony.

What you’ll do:

• Lead a polyglot team of 5-7 engineers and partner closely with Product and Engineering teams across Datadog to deliver industry-leading capabilities that power consistent, scalable, and intuitive instrumentation across languages.
• Drive adoption of key features like runtime metrics and startup diagnostics by ensuring they are safe, valuable, and enabled by default.
• Shape the strategy and execution for APM configuration management, making it simple, observable, and extensible for customers of all sizes.
• Contribute to Datadog’s presence in the OpenTelemetry ecosystem by influencing specifications and aligning SDK infrastructure with industry standards.

Who you are:

• An experienced Engineering Manager with a track record of shipping.
• Experienced in two or more languages and comfortable building cross-runtime systems.
• Have a passion for libraries and OSS software development.
• Deep experience working on or with observability tooling.
• You care about developer experience, clean APIs, and reliable systems.
• Highly collaborative.
• An ability to pivot from high-level product narratives to highly technical implementation details (and articulate how one impacts the other).
• Possesses experience with one or more of: SDK or library development, observability tooling, OSS software development.

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.

Key skills/competency

• Engineering Management
• APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
• SDK Development
• OpenTelemetry
• Observability
• Polyglot Programming
• Developer Experience (DX)
• API Design
• Distributed Systems
• Software Architecture