Manager I, Engineering - Agent Data Plane

About the role

The Agent Data Plane team is building the next foundation for the Datadog Agent: a new Rust-based platform for the telemetry pipelines (logs, metrics, traces, checks, and more) that run on our customers' infrastructure. Designed for performance, a small and predictable resource footprint, and resiliency, Agent Data Plane will take over the Agent's existing Go-based data pipelines. See a recent episode of Datadog On to hear more about the origins of this project from its technical lead: Datadog On: Return of Rust.

As the team's first dedicated Engineering Manager, you'll guide a team of five engineers, partner closely with the project's technical lead, and help other Agent teams build their pipelines on the platform. Your work will lower the cost customers pay to run the Agent, reduce Datadog's own infrastructure costs, and make the Agent's performance and reliability a lasting competitive advantage. This is also a very public evolution of the Agent's architecture: the codebase is open source, and the work lends itself to technical blog posts and conference talks. As the Agent organization grows, you'll have the opportunity to take on broader scope and grow into the next level of engineering management.

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:

- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of five engineers across Madrid and the US, ranging from early-career to senior, helping each of them build their impact and career

- Own planning and delivery for Agent Data Plane, including the phased migration of the Datadog Agent's data pipelines from Go to Rust

- Build strong relationships with the teams that own the logs, metrics, traces, and checks pipelines built on Agent Data Plane, as well as the APM Agent team, aligning priorities and working through competing requests

- Evolve Agent Data Plane into a true platform that other teams can build on with minimal support, while staying consistent with the project's architecture and goals

- Partner with the technical lead and senior engineers on design decisions, bringing your own technical judgment to performance, resource usage, and reliability tradeoffs

- Represent the team in cross-team and technical discussions, and help shape the team's new on-call rotation

Who You Are:

- You have 2+ years of experience managing software engineering teams

- You have a strong individual contributor background (typically 5+ years) and the technical depth to earn the trust of senior engineers, including those who know more about the details than you do

- You have 2+ years of hands-on systems programming experience in a language such as Rust, C++, Go, or C

- You've owned systems that other teams or customers depend on, and you've guided your team through incidents when things broke