Staff Developer Advocate - DevOps & Automation

Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across their entire technology stack to detect and resolve issues before they impact end users.

As a Staff Developer Advocate for Service Management, you will bridge hands-on engineering experience with creative technical storytelling to shape the industry landscape across cloud observability, incident response, on-call operations, and service management. Serving as a subject matter expert across internal engineering pods and the global SRE/DevOps practitioner community, you will build compelling demos, deliver public technical talks (SREcon, DevOpsDays), author technical content, contribute to open-source integrations, and feed operational feedback directly into Datadog's product management teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Subject Matter Expertise & Advocacy: Serve as Datadog's subject matter expert for service management—including incident response, on-call workflows, Internal Developer Portals (IDP), work management, workflow automation, and agent builder platforms.
• Technical Content & Storytelling: Create high-impact technical assets across multiple mediums (working code demos, conference presentations, technical blog posts, documentation, webinars, and open-source projects) to establish Datadog as an industry leader.
• Product & Engineering Partnership: Partner with product engineering teams to build production-grade demo environments, coach internal engineers on public presentation skills, and influence product roadmaps through feature feedback and bug triage.
• Open Source & Ecosystem Integrations: Interface with open-source practitioner communities to drive messaging, develop custom API integrations, and advance modern observability standards.
• Community Leadership: Active engagement and presentation across major SRE/DevOps conferences, workshops, live streams, and developer forums.

Requirements

Engineering & Advocacy Experience Depth

• 5+ years of practical experience as a Platform Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), DevOps Engineer, or Software Developer with direct experience running production systems and serving in on-call/incident response rotations.
• Service Management Mastery: Deep understanding of core service-management practices (incident response lifecycle, post-incident reviews, SLOs/SLIs, on-call rotations) using tooling such as Datadog, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, incident.io, Rootly, Jira Cloud Platform, or Cortex.
• 2+ years of proven technical storytelling experience—evidenced by publicly available writing samples, conference talk recordings (SREcon, DevOpsDays, SREday), blog posts, or video tutorials.
• Software & API Literacy: Hands-on scripting/coding proficiency in at least one modern language (Python, Go, Node.js, or Bash) paired with practical experience working with REST APIs, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Self-Driven Technical Curiosity: Demonstrated passion for self-directed exploration of emerging technologies, open-source frameworks, and modern cloud architecture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct hands-on experience administering ITSM platforms (Jira Service Management, ServiceNow).
• Recognized active contributor within global SRE, DevOps, or incident response community organizations.
• Portfolio of published open-source tools, API SDKs, or custom observability integrations.

Total Rewards & Benefits

• Compensation & Equity: Base salary range of $136,000 – $170,000 USD + Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) + Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) with company discount.
• Healthcare & Wellbeing: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage, mental health resources, and parental planning support.
• Financial & Retirement: 401(k) plan with company match, life/disability insurance, and fitness reimbursements.
• Growth & Onboarding: Structured onboarding, cross-departmental internal mentorship programs, and continuous career development funds.