$450K Datadog Senior Software Engineer Offer 2022

I recently interviewed and received an offer from Datadog for a senior software engineering role. After some negotiation, I got an offer for around $450K yearly compensation, excluding the sign-on bonus.

What’s Datadog?

Datadog is software to monitor how your services are performing. They have four “buckets” of products:

• Infrastructure monitoring (CPU, Disk usage, IO, System load)
• Application monitoring (endpoint performance, e.g. latency)
• Log management (store, manage, and search all the logs your systems generate)
• Miscellaneous (security monitoring, user journeys across apps).

They went public in 2019 and are currently worth ~$24.5 billion.

Their interview process consists of:

• Recruiter call
• Technical phone screen
• Onsite (4 Rounds)
  - Coding Round
  - Coding Round
  - System design
  - Manager discussion on past projects and leadership
• Team Matching
• Offer / Negotiation

Recruiter Call

This is a standard call for the recruiter to learn more about you and for you to learn more about Datadog. The recruiter pitched Datadog as a very engineering-driven company given what its core product is and how engineers can create high impact there. They also gave me an overview of each of the different organizations and what they worked on and some potential teams that I’d be interested in joining based off my background.

Tips:

• Know what you’re hoping to work on next! The recruiter can do their best to pair you to a team that seems like a good fit.
• Know the basics of Datadog. While not knowing minor details of the company is completely fine, don’t show up to the interview without a basic understanding of the product and why you’re interested in working on it.
• Rehearse quick summaries of projects you’ve worked on; highlight what kind of technologies you were using and the end result of your work. Don’t go too into detail here; keep it at a high-level and if the recruiter is interested, they’ll ask more. As a rule of thumb, I like to keep my project summaries around 45 seconds to one minute.
• Ask for compensation ranges here; they won’t give exact numbers because a lot of the final offer will come down to your performance, but get a range here to make sure it’s in line with your expectations.

Technical Phone Screen

The technical phone screen consisted of two coding questions. Before those, the interviewer also briefly asked me about what I worked on and asked me to explain a technically challenging problem I solved. This wasn’t just a pleasantry; I could tell they were taking notes and I’m confident this is part of the scoring rubric.

The first coding question sounded straightforward. Initially, I thought it might’ve been a dynamic programming question, but the interviewer told me solve it in a more simple way.

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