Manager I, Engineering - Applied AI/ML Product Analytics Suite

Datadog's Product Analytics suite spans Product Analytics, Session Replay, Feature Flags, and Experimentation. Together they give product teams a complete, quantitative and qualitative picture of how users experience their applications, plus the tools to release, measure, and improve those experiences with confidence. Our team of Applied Scientists makes this space smarter and more autonomous, researching, prototyping, and industrializing AI/ML capabilities that make the suite proactive and agentic by default: AI-driven event understanding and instrumentation, conversational analytics, automated insight reporting, and UI/UX issue detection from session replays. The ambition is to let product teams act with autonomy, moving from question to insight to safely released change without depending on engineering or analysts. As the Engineering Manager for this team, you'll lead a team of Applied Scientists through an early-stage, high-impact opportunity: defining the team's technical vision, growing its footprint, and shaping how AI capabilities get built and delivered across the suite. This is greenfield work, both in the R\&D itself and in the team you'll grow around it. 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 and grow a team of Applied Scientists researching, prototyping, and industrializing AI/ML capabilities across the suite Define the technical vision and roadmap for the suite's agentic and proactive AI/ML capabilities: event understanding, conversational analytics, insight reporting, and session-replay issue detection Stay hands-on as a technical contributor and reviewer, helping the team move from research prototypes to production-grade capabilities Shape how AI capabilities get built and delivered across the suite, partnering closely with product and engineering leadership Hire and onboard Applied Scientists as Datadog scales its investment in applied AI/ML Represent the team's progress and priorities to stakeholders across Product Analytics and Datadog's broader AI efforts Who You Are: An experienced technical leader with a background in applied AI/ML, ideally with hands-on research or applied science experience of your own A people manager, whether established or early in your management journey, backed by strong technical credibility Comfortable operating in greenfield ambiguity: defining direction and structure where little exists yet, rather than executing against an established roadmap Experience taking ML/AI capabilities from research prototype to production, ideally in an analytics, NLP, or user-behavior domain A clear communicator who can translate technical AI/ML concepts for product and engineering stakeholders Motivated by early-stage, high-impact work and comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with it 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: New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing Intradepartmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups) Access to Inclusion Talks, our internal panel discussions Free, global mental health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+ Competitive global benefits Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog. LI-Hybrid About Datadog: Datadog is the