At a Glance
About This Role
As a Senior Security Engineer within Application Security at Datadog, you will help secure emerging application architectures where established security patterns may not yet exist, including agentic applications, LLM-enabled products, protocol-driven tool use, and untrusted execution environments. You will establish and validate security models, requirements, and controls while partnering with product and platform teams to develop secure-by-default approaches. Your work will address evolving trust boundaries, agent identity, data access, tool permissions, and runtime behavior through threat modeling, security solutions, and practical implementation. You will have the opportunity to shape how Datadog safely supports new application paradigms and address emerging security risks before they become systemic.
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:
- Define security models, requirements, and guardrails for emerging application architectures where established patterns are incomplete or do not yet exist.
- Design, implement, and validate practical security controls that reduce risk in emerging architectures and high-risk system behaviors.
- Shape how emerging systems authenticate, authorize actions, isolate workloads, and access data, applying least-privilege principles throughout.
- Partner with product, platform, Infrastructure Security, and other engineering teams to identify security gaps and embed secure-by-default requirements from early design through production.
- Lead threat modeling and security assessments for new and existing products, focusing on evolving threats, unfamiliar trust boundaries, and new interaction patterns.
- Prioritize and drive remediation of emerging security risks, including continuous security testing where it provides durable coverage, and refine security approaches as architectures and threats evolve.
Who You Are:
- You have 5+ years of experience in software engineering or development in a collaborative environment, with Go, Rust, or Python experience preferred.
- You have experience in security and/or infrastructure/platform engineering, with exposure to distributed systems, application platforms, or agent-based architectures.
- You have designed or implemented security controls within application infrastructure, such as authentication, authorization, API security, zero-trust networking, workload protection, sandboxing, or runtime hardening.
- You understand common application security vulnerabilities and mitigation techniques, including those relevant to LLM applications and agentic systems; familiarity with LLM frameworks and protocols such as MCP or A2A is a plus.
- You bring strong problem-solving skills and can work independently and collaboratively in ambiguous or rapidly evolving problem spaces.
- You have successfully driven security initiatives with engineering and leadership stakeholders and are committed to staying current with security practices, emerging technologies, and evolving threats.
Datadog values people from all walks of life. We know 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 experience, 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 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.
Equal Opportunity at Datadog:
Datadog is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and other characteristics protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.
Datadog endeavors to make our Careers Page accessible to all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please complete this form. This form is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.
Privacy and AI Guidelines:
Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice. For information on our AI policy, please visit Interviewing at Datadog AI Guidelines.
Source: Datadog careers · View original posting
About Datadog
Datadog, Inc. is a technology company based in New York City, founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc. It specializes in providing a comprehensive observability and monitoring platform for cloud-scale applications and IT infrastructure through a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. With over 5,200 employees and offices in major cities worldwide, Datadog has established itself as a leader in the industry. The company offers a cloud-based data analytics platform that includes infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, security monitoring, network performance monitoring, and user experience monitoring. Datadog's platform aggregates metrics, logs, and traces into a single dashboard, enabling real-time visibility and collaboration for software development teams, IT operations, and security teams. Its solutions are widely adopted across various industries, including technology, finance, retail, and media, supporting organizations that rely on cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices.
Security at Datadog
Compiled from public job postings, careers pages, and company materials. Data may not reflect current state — verify during interviews.
Security Philosophy
- Datadog frames application security as lifecycle coverage from development to production, prioritizing contextualized risk and developer workflows (IDE, PRs, CI/CD).
- They adopt a decentralized security model driven by a Security Champions program.
- Their philosophy includes integrating security into every step of the SDLC, catching issues early in the IDE, and automating secure code delivery in CI/CD workflows.
- They use their own platform extensively to understand a service's overall security posture, conduct security design reviews, and customize vulnerability severity scores based on context.
Security Team
Datadog's security organization includes specialized domains such as application security, platform security, cloud security, detection and response, and customer trust. They define role-level responsibilities for embedding controls and governance, with Engineering Managers (EMs) embedding AI security and privacy controls into CI/CD pipelines. The Security Champions program consists of engineers from both product and platform engineering teams. Information regarding the explicit reporting line for the AppSec team, specific team head names, direct AppSec leader LinkedIn profiles, active AppSec job posting counts, and granular team size is not publicly available from the searched sources.
Key Initiatives
- Datadog employs a Security Champions program, which is explicitly stated and driven by engineers from product and platform teams. Their 'shift-left' practices include integrating security into every step of the SDLC, catching issues early in the IDE, and automating secure code delivery in CI/CD workflows.
- They implement CI/CD quality gates to automatically block merges to default branches.
- For vulnerability management, they focus on continuous production visibility, automatically associating vulnerable services with their code owners and responsible teams, and detecting the exact location of vulnerabilities and their owners.
- They also conduct security design reviews.
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