Manager I, Engineering - Applied AI/ML Product Analytics Suite

<p>Datadog’s Product Analytics suite spans Product Analytics, Session Replay, Feature Flags, and Experimentation. Together they give product teams a complete, quantitative and qualitative picture of how users experience their applications, plus the tools to release, measure, and improve those experiences with confidence.</p> <p>Our team of Applied Scientists makes this space smarter and more autonomous, researching, prototyping, and industrializing AI/ML capabilities that make the suite proactive and agentic by default: AI-driven event understanding and instrumentation, conversational analytics, automated insight reporting, and UI/UX issue detection from session replays. The ambition is to let product teams act with autonomy, moving from question to insight to safely released change without depending on engineering or analysts.</p> <p>As the Engineering Manager for this team, you’ll lead a team of Applied Scientists through an early-stage, high-impact opportunity: defining the team’s technical vision, growing its footprint, and shaping how AI capabilities get built and delivered across the suite. This is greenfield work, both in the R&D itself and in the team you’ll grow around it.</p> <p><em>At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.</em></p> <p><strong>What You’ll Do:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Lead and grow a team of Applied Scientists researching, prototyping, and industrializing AI/ML capabilities across the suite</li> <li>Define the technical vision and roadmap for the suite’s agentic and proactive AI/ML capabilities: event understanding, conversational analytics, insight reporting, and session-replay issue detection</li> <li>Stay hands-on as a technical contributor and reviewer, helping the team move from research prototypes to production-grade capabilities</li> <li>Shape how AI capabilities get built and delivered across the suite, partnering closely with product and engineering leadership</li> <li>Hire and onboard Applied Scientists as Datadog scales its investment in applied AI/ML</li> <li>Represent the team’s progress and priorities to stakeholders across Product Analytics and Datadog’s broader AI efforts</li> </ul> <p><strong>Who You Are:</strong></p> <ul> <li>An experienced technical leader with a background in applied AI/ML, ideally with hands-on research or applied science experience of your own</li> <li>A people manager, whether established or early in your management journey, backed by strong technical credibility</li> <li>Comfortable operating in greenfield ambiguity: defining direction and structure where little exists yet, rather than executing against an established roadmap</li> <li>Experience taking ML/AI capabilities from research prototype to production, ideally in an analytics, NLP, or user-behavior domain</li> <li>A clear communicator who can translate technical AI/ML concepts for product and engineering stakeholders</li> <li>Motivated by early-stage, high-impact work and comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with it</li> </ul> <p><em>Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above