Director, Engineering - Digital Experience Monitoring

<p>Datadog's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) group is one of the company's fastest-growing product areas, spanning Real User Monitoring (RUM), Product Analytics, Synthetic Monitoring, Feature Flags, and Datadog Studio, our newest AI-native observability surface. As Director, you will own engineering for one or more of these product areas, with scope shaped by your background and interests, and you will manage 50-60 engineers through a team of Engineering Managers. You'll partner with Senior Directors and product leadership to shape the roadmap, not just execute against it, and you'll help drive AI adoption across engineering tooling, workflows, and product features. This role is based in Paris, one of Datadog's most established engineering hubs, with a clear growth path to Senior Director for the right candidate.<br><br></p> <p><em>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.</em></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>What You'll Do:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Own engineering for one or more DEM product areas with scope calibrated to your background and strengths</li> <li>Manage 50-60 engineers through a layer of Engineering Managers; this is a manager-of-managers role</li> <li>Shape the roadmap alongside product leadership rather than simply executing against it — push back on, iterate on, and help author the strategy for your area</li> <li>Drive AI adoption across the engineering org, from tooling and workflows to product features and team practices</li> <li>Navigate cross-team dependencies across DEM, APM, Core Platform, AI Platform, and Data Science</li> <li>Build and retain engineering talent in Paris, mentor Engineering Managers toward Director readiness, and participate in the on-call rotation</li> </ul> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Who You Are:</strong></p> <ul> <li>You have directly managed Engineering Managers, not just individual contributors — this is a non-negotiable requirement for the role</li> <li>You integrate AI deeply into how you lead and how your teams build, treating AI-first thinking as core engineering practice rather than a feature bolted onto the product</li> <li>You have a track record of shaping product decisions, not just executing against a spec</li> <li>You've worked with large-scale, event-driven or data-intensive backend systems — ingestion pipelines, high-throughput APIs, or time-series/event data at scale</li> <li>You bring full-stack or frontend-adjacent experience; DEM is an SDK-heavy, browser- and mobile