Staff Product Manager - Self Improving Software

Description

As a Staff Product Manager on Datadog's Self-Improving Products team, you will take a new product family from zero to one: a closed loop that watches how a customer's software and its users behave, ranks what is worth changing, proposes the change, proves whether it worked, and carries the result into the next cycle. Datadog already holds every piece this product needs, including behavioral data from Product Analytics and Session Replay, full-stack telemetry from APM, Log Management, Error Tracking, and Continuous Profiler, rollout control through Feature Flags and Experimentation, and a coding agent in Bits AI Dev Agent that opens verified pull requests from production signal. You will own assembling these into one product where the loop closes on its own. This is founding work with no precedent inside Datadog, and an opportunity to grow as a product leader by shaping the scope, recruiting the first design partners, and setting the quality bar for an AI-native product from the ground up.

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.

Responsibilities

• Set product direction for a new product family by defining the problems and desired outcomes, and partnering with engineering to find the narrowest first slice that proves the loop closes and delivers value to customers in phases.
• Own the product decisions at every stage of the loop: what signal is trustworthy enough to trigger an automated change, which opportunities rank highest and with what confidence, what a proposed change must contain before a customer merges it, what evidence proves it worked, and what the system remembers for the next cycle.
• Define the autonomy ladder and its limits, from suggestion, to draft, to auto-opened pull request, to auto-rollout, along with the controls, defaults, and audit trail customers need to rely on it. Some rungs stay off by design, and you own those decisions.
• Set the quality bar for a product that is non-deterministic: build the evaluation sets with engineering, decide what "good enough to ship" means, and hold that bar when it moves a date.
• Recruit the first design partners yourself, sit in their triage rotations, turn what you learn there into the roadmap, and keep talking to them after launch.
• Develop and defend the sizing, impact, and cost-to-serve analysis that engineering leadership and pricing partners need to make resourcing calls, partnering with engineering on the unit economics of inference and the data platform and bringing that cost profile into packaging, metering, and pricing before launch rather than after.
• Deliver concise written and verbal communication to executive, engineering, and customer audiences, clarifying complex architecture, quality trade-offs, and go-to-market, including where agentic observability, product analytics, and experimentation are heading and how that shapes the product.

Requirements

• You have shipped AI products, not prototypes: you have taken at least one AI-native product to production customers, and you can describe what it got wrong in the field and what you changed in response.
• You treat evaluation as product work: you have built or commissioned evaluation sets, set the bar for shipping a model or prompt change, and held that bar under schedule pressure.
• You are fluent in agent failure modes and design for non-determinism deliberately, accounting for confidence, reversibility, blast radius, review surfaces, and graceful failure.
• You have a zero-to-one track record: you have started something with no roadmap and no team and got it to customers who renewed, you narrow ruthlessly, and you have ended a direction you championed and can explain why.
• You read across staff engineers, consuming product teams, sales and FinOps, marketing, and finance, and turn diffuse signals into a defensible product position.
• You are collaborative, opinionated, and comfortable with ambiguity: you build trust quickly with engineers, PM peers, designers, and commercial partners, you bring strong product opinions and adapt as new evidence emerges, and you write the document that gives diffuse work a shape.
• You have 8+ years of Product Management experience, or a track record showing Staff-level capabilities in related software roles. We weigh shipped AI products and zero-to-one evidence more heavily than years.
• You have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience (preferred).
• 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

• 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.
• Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, and may include variable compensation. The reasonably estimated salary for this role at Datadog ranges from $244,000 to $305,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.
• LI-Hybrid
• Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, and may include variable compensation. Actual compensation is based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience. In addition, Datadog offers a wide range of best in class, comprehensive and inclusive employee benefits for this role including healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.
• The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is:
• $244,000 - $305,000 USD
• About Datadog:
• Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across the technology stack to manage complexity at scale. It brings applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security into one place, using AI to detect and resolve issues before they impact customers. Trusted globally by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth AI leaders, Datadog enables businesses to move faster with clarity and confidence. Learn more about DatadogLife on Instagram , LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.