Senior Software Engineer - Linux

The eBPF APM team is building a zero-instrumentation observability solution that automatically discovers services on every host, supports both plaintext and TLS-encrypted traffic, classifies Layer 7 protocols, decodes service-level traffic, and reports RED (requests, errors, duration) metrics. Leveraging deep expertise in eBPF, the team operates across a wide range of Linux kernel versions, distributions, and complex customer environments. In addition to low-level networking, the team solves challenges related to protocol versioning, TLS detection across diverse languages and runtimes, and resilient performance in production systems
We’re looking for a senior engineer with strong systems-level thinking and a good understanding of Linux. You should be comfortable working close to the kernel, ideally with experience in eBPF, or with a strong desire to dive into it. Proficiency in C/C++/ Go is essential, and familiarity with networking protocols, TLS internals, or distributed tracing is a strong advantage.
You’ll join a high-impact team tackling ambitious technical challenges—like decoding traffic across multiple protocols, and ensuring high-fidelity metrics in complex, real-world environments. You’ll be expected to lead design and implementation efforts, contribute to roadmap planning, and collaborate across teams to ensure our solution remains robust, scalable, and frictionless for our users.
This role is a great fit for engineers who thrive on low-level, performance-sensitive problems, and want to shape the future of observability through cutting-edge kernel technology.
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.

What You’ll Do: