Datadog Application Observability Engineer

Position Overview

application layer

backend/frontend developers, QA, product, and DevOps

Primary Responsibilities

• Implement and manage

  Datadog APM, Real User Monitoring (RUM), Distributed Tracing, Service Monitoring, and Application Logs

  across multiple applications.
• Instrument application code with

  Datadog libraries, OpenTelemetry, or native integrations

  to capture business KPIs and performance metrics.
• Configure

  synthetic tests, error tracking, and frontend performance dashboards

  to monitor user experience and critical paths.
• Create meaningful dashboards for:
• latency and throughput
• endpoint/API performance
• error rates and exceptions
• RUM user behavior and UX performance
• SLA/SLO trends at the application level
• Lead the creation of

  alerting strategies based on real application behavior

  , including anomaly detection, latency spikes, and error bursts.
• Correlate logs, metrics, and trace data to perform

  root-cause analysis of application failures and performance degradation

  .
• Work with development teams to:
• define observability requirements early in development
• integrate monitoring into CI/CD and test environments
• improve tagging, business context, and trace spans
• Conduct application performance reviews and identify opportunities for:
• response-time improvement
• database or API bottlenecks
• code-level optimizations
• Train developers and QA on

  how to use Datadog tools for debugging, troubleshooting, and performance testing

  .
• Recommend improvements to observability maturity and documentation.

Required Skills

• Hands-on experience with:

• Datadog APM

• Datadog Logs

• RUM (Real User Monitoring)

• Service Maps

• Distributed Tracing

• Synthetic Monitoring

• Strong application debugging and performance analysis experience, using trace/span data.
• Proficiency instrumenting apps in at least one modern programming language:
• Node.js, Java, Python, Go, Ruby, .NET, etc.
• Solid understanding of:
• HTTP APIs
• microservices
• queues/event-driven flows
• frontend performance basics
• Comfortable working with developers and QA to embed observability.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with

  OpenTelemetry

  and custom instrumentation practices.
• Experience with

  databases, caching, async messaging

  , and how to measure them via tracing.
• Ability to derive

  business KPIs from monitoring data

  (conversion impacts, latency cost, UX issues).
• Exposure to

  CI/CD integration

  and automated observability testing.