Senior Developer Advocate

About the role

We are a team of engineers that translate our real-world experience to help our user communities solve problems. With a focus on AI-accelerated workflows and next-generation developer ecosystems, you will have the opportunity to meet fast-moving teams where they are, helping them lay strong engineering foundations and broadening your impact to the developer community at large. This is a unique opportunity to use both your engineering depth and authentic storytelling skills to shape how the next wave of builders approach software health, scalability, and observability. You will own the narrative arc between emerging AI tooling and production-ready engineering practices, ensuring that developer workflows remain robust as they evolve. You will act as a bridge between rapid experimentation and disciplined reliability, guiding users to make thoughtful architectural decisions. Your work will directly influence how developers perceive and adopt observability in their day-to-day coding and deployment cycles. You will champion the human side of engineering by amplifying community stories and lessons learned back into product thinking.

Key facts

What you'll do

Guide developers in an AI-accelerated environment by examining how AI coding assistants and rapid-prototyping tools reshape software workflows, and steering teams on how to harmonize quick experimentation with steadfast practices around performance, code health, and system reliability. Create in public by producing genuine, peer-to-peer technical content, broadcasting your engineering insights directly across channels where modern developers interact both online and offline. Establish a constructive, two-way feedback mechanism between fast-evolving developer communities and internal teams, converting real-world developer experiences into concrete product inputs while championing user needs from within the organization. Architect and release high-quality open-source boilerplate templates, quickstarts, and integration tools that make adding observability frictionless across AI-native workflows, emerging platforms like Vercel and Supabase, and major cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure. Conduct hands-on explorations of new tools and patterns, translating complex concepts into clear, actionable guidance that helps developers build with confidence. Mentor fellow engineers through content and direct interaction, elevating the collective skill level of the community. Drive initiatives that connect product strategy with on-the-ground usage, ensuring that solutions reflect the realities of diverse development environments. Represent Datadog in technical forums and collaborative spaces, ensuring that authentic developer voices shape the direction of our offerings. Evaluate and refine existing educational assets and workflows to ensure they remain relevant and effective for evolving tech stacks. Collaborate with cross-functional partners to validate that new features and templates meet the needs of real-world engineering teams.

Requirements

Possess approximately 10+ years of software engineering experience, ideally having launched applications from scratch or operated within an early-stage startup setting where you wore multiple hats. Natively leverage AI coding assistants and rapid-prototyping tools as a core component of your daily development workflow. Demonstrate multi-stack versatility, comfortably writing and debugging code across multiple programming languages such as JavaScript/TypeScript or Python, and navigating deployment paradigms across next-gen platforms and traditional cloud ecosystems. Communicate with authenticity, backed by roughly 3+ years of experience in technical storytelling and community engagement, supported by a publicly accessible portfolio of peer-to-peer artifacts like GitHub repositories, technical blogs, video walkthroughs, or public speaking presentations. Exhibit a forward-looking mindset characterized by self-driven exploration of emerging technologies, with deep passion for developer education, mentorship, and enabling other engineers to refine their craft. Maintain a builder-oriented perspective shaped by real-world deployment experience and a commitment to software sustainability. Show resilience and adaptability when guiding teams through fast-paced changes in tools and best practices. Demonstrate integrity in balancing innovation with the practical constraints of production environments.

Nice to have

Maintain an active presence or leadership role within developer spaces, contributing as a participant, collaborator, or moderator in communities focused on next-gen technology (such as meetups, Discord, Reddit, or open-source ecosystems).

Practical notes

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