Distinguished Architect - AI

Datadog is expanding the Technical Solutions (TS) organization by seeking a customer-focused, deeply technical Distinguished Architect to join our Product Solutions Architecture (PSA) team. In this role, you will act as a technical multiplier for the world's leading AI labs and AI-native companies. You will bridge the gap between their bleeding-edge infrastructure aspirations and Datadog’s technology roadmap, ensuring our platform natively solves the unique observability challenges of training and deploying foundational models at scale.

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.

What You’ll Do:

• Leadership: Demonstrate thought leadership in the AI/LLM space. Influence key decision makers and stakeholders by connecting technical capabilities to organizational and business impact.
• Advisory: Strategically partner with highly technical Founders, Heads of Infrastructure, and Research Lead peers. Guide them on best practices and emerging industry trends in the AI/LLM space. Lead high-level technical and architectural conversations around AI adoption.
• Presentations: Lead deep-dive architecture reviews and design engagements with customer teams and their leaders to share industry trends, best practices, and demonstrate how Datadog can support high-throughput hyper scale AI workloads.
• GTM: Identify emerging AI-native technology shifts and feed them directly back to Datadog Product Management. Co-create custom observability integrations and solutions alongside Product SAs to keep Datadog at the absolute forefront of the AI stack.  
• Collaboration: Collaborate with Product Solutions Architecture (PSA), Sales, Sales Engineering and Marketing in providing high-quality technical resources to a broad audience of practitioners and economic buyers. 
• Hiring: Assist leadership in recruiting and hiring of top talent for the Product Solutions Architecture and Field CTO teams. 

Who You Are:

• Industry Experience: 10+ years of experience with at-scale distributed systems architecture, high-performance computing, or large-scale infrastructure. Deep familiarity with the AI/LLM ecosystem, accelerator hardware (GPUs/TPUs), and modern orchestration frameworks. 
• Strategic Thinker: Able to think long term and creatively about a wide variety of technical and business challenges
• Stakeholder Management: Proven experience interacting with and influencing elite individual contributors, research scientists, and technical founders in flat, rapid-growth environments. 
• Technologist: A true close-to-the-metal technologist who maintains deep hands-on credibility and can white-board architectural solutions seamlessly with senior engineers. Strong understanding of best practices and real world challenges AI/LLM Ops and LLM Observability (LLMO).
• Presenter: Excellent customer-facing presentation skills for large audiences, comfortable discussing complex technical details as well as with briefing executives or non-technical personas.
• Communicator: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to link product functionality to business objectives, value realization and ROI. 
• Travel: Able to travel via auto, train or air up to 50% of the time
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field, Master’s degree preferred

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:

• Best-in-breed onboarding
• Generous global benefits
• Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
• An inclusive company culture, able to join our Community Guilds and Inclusion Talks

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

The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is: 330000 - 440000 USD