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# Forward Deployed Engineer

- **Company:** Datadog
- **Location:** New York, NY, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $244,000.0 - $305,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Software Engineering, Working Model 2D, Datadog, Production Code, Codebase, Software Coding
- **Published:** August 22, 2026
- **Apply:** https://careers.datadoghq.com/detail/8144946/?gh_jid=8144946

## About the Role

* 5 years of professional software engineering experience, with hands-on coding ability across the stack you're deployed into
 * Experience with feature flagging, experimentation, or config management systems (internal or vendor)
 * Comfortable dropping into unfamiliar codebases, languages, and frameworks quickly — no specific stack required, but strong fundamentals and fast ramp-up
 * Experience shipping production code, not just prototypes — you understand the difference between a demo and something that survives a migration
 * Customer-facing experience, or strong motivation to build it — comfortable being in the room with customer engineers, understanding their constraints, and adapting your approach
 * Skilled at simplifying complex technical tradeoffs for both engineering and non-engineering stakeholders
 * Motivated by outcomes — deal velocity, successful migrations, and customer trust — not just elegant code
 * Comfortable operating with ambiguity, moving between architecture conversations and hands-on implementation in the same week

Bonus Points:

 * Experience in a forward-deployed, consulting, or professional services engineering role
 * Exposure to large-scale system migrations
 * Prior work in a startup or fast-scaling environment where you had to own ambiguous problems end-to-end

## Description

As a Forward Deployed Engineer on the Feature Flags team, you'll partner directly with customers to accelerate their feature flag implementations — from initial architecture consulting through prototype builds to full-scale migrations. This role is for someone who wants to write code with customers, not just advise them. You'll work hands-on inside customer codebases to unblock complex, high-stakes deployments, directly influencing deal velocity and customer success. Working closely with Sales, Solutions, and Engineering, you'll be the technical force that turns a signed contract into a live, adopted implementation.

What You'll Do:

 * Serve as the hands-on technical partner for strategic customers implementing Datadog Feature Flags, from pre-sales technical validation through post-sales delivery
 * Consult on flag architecture and implementation approach for complex environments — multi-service, multi-platform, high-scale deployments
 * Build prototype flag implementations directly in customer codebases to prove value and de-risk technical decisions early in the sales cycle
 * Implement flags across diverse and advanced deployment modes (server-side, client-side, edge, mobile, streaming/real-time) tailored to each customer's stack
 * Drive full flag migrations to completion — including legacy system cutover — efficiently and with minimal customer engineering burden
 * Identify patterns across customer implementations and feed them back to Product and Engineering to improve the core product and reduce future implementation time
 * Collaborate closely with Engineering on technical edge cases, product gaps, and implementation tooling
 * Partner with Sales and Solutions to accelerate deal cycles by removing technical risk and uncertainty


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