Developer Engagement Lead

Developer Engagement Lead

Reports to: Head of Developer Growth · New York, NY

NOTE: This is not a traditional social media or community management role. It’s a developer growth role that sits within the Product org.

Developers are already talking about Datadog - on Reddit, Discord, Hacker News, GitHub, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, forums, and places we probably haven’t found yet.

We’re hiring a Developer Engagement Lead to make sure we’re part of those conversations.

You’ll own how Datadog listens, responds, and participates across developer channels. That means running our existing developer social accounts, building our presence in new communities, creating the monitoring and response systems that help us find relevant conversations quickly, and connecting developers with the right people inside Datadog.

This is a builder role. We’re not looking for someone to manage a content calendar or simply moderate a community. We want someone who can build the operating model for developer engagement at scale.

What you'll own

• Build our developer listening and engagement system. Create the tooling and workflows to monitor conversations about Datadog, our products, our competitors, and the problems developers are trying to solve across Reddit, Hacker News, Discord, GitHub, X, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, YouTube, and other relevant platforms.
• Turn monitoring into action. Build a process for identifying conversations worth joining, determining when Datadog should respond, and routing questions or feedback to the right engineer, PM, DevRel, support, or product expert.
• Own our developer channels. Run @datadogdevs on X and Datadog Developers on LinkedIn, including publishing, engagement, replies, and experimentation.
• Expand where Datadog participates. Establish and grow our presence in places where developers already spend time. That may include launching Discord, creating a stronger Reddit strategy, building participation models for Hacker News or GitHub, or identifying entirely new channels.
• Make Datadog more responsive. Define response guidelines, escalation paths, ownership models, and expectations so developer conversations don’t disappear into screenshots and Slack threads.
• Participate directly. Know when to respond as Datadog, when to pull in an expert, when an engineer should answer under their own name, and when the best response is simply to listen.
• Create feedback loops into Product. Surface recurring questions, pain points, objections, competitive mentions, product feedback, and emerging developer conversations to Product, Engineering, Developer Growth, and other relevant teams.
• Get more technical voices into the conversation. Make it easy for Datadog engineers, PMs, researchers, and other experts to participate directly in developer conversations instead of relying exclusively on brand accounts.
• Turn shipped work into conversations. Find compelling ways to bring releases, changelogs, technical content, demos, events, and engineering work into the places developers are already talking.
• Build measurement that matters. Define how we measure developer engagement beyond follower counts and impressions. Track things like conversations joined, response coverage, sentiment and recurring themes, participation from technical teams, traffic, product discovery, trials, and signups.
• Run experiments. Test new platforms, formats, tooling, workflows, response models, and engagement programs with a clear hypothesis and readout. Keep what works and move quickly past what doesn’t.

Who you are

You understand how developers behave online. 

You’ve built an audience, community, engagement program, developer program, or similar function, and can point to outcomes you changed.

You have strong judgment about when a company should join a conversation and when it shouldn’t.

You are naturally curious. If developers suddenly start discussing something relevant to Datadog, your instinct is to understand why, find the thread, and figure out whether we should participate.

You think in systems. If ten people are manually forwarding Reddit posts into Slack, you want to build something better.

You’re comfortable with tooling, automation, monitoring platforms, APIs, AI, and lightweight workflows. You don’t necessarily need to be an engineer, but you should be comfortable working closely with engineers and technical products.

You can create structure where none exists: monitoring rules, triage processes, response playbooks, escalation paths, reporting, and measurement.

You know how to earn participation from internal experts rather than simply assigning them another marketing task.

You move quickly, have strong judgment, and know what can ship immediately versus what needs another set of eyes.

You have opinions about developer culture, platforms, formats, and internet behavior — and you update those opinions when the evidence changes.

Your background

You may come from Growth,Developer Marketing, Audience Development, Product, Media, Social, Technical Communications, or somewhere entirely different.

What matters most is that you can show us how you’ve built participation around an audience, created systems that scale engagement, and turned what people were saying into action.

Experience working with a technical or enthusiast audience is especially valuable.

Bonus points for:

• Experience building social listening or community-monitoring systems
• Deep familiarity with Reddit, Discord, Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, X, or similar developer platforms
• Experience launching or operating a Discord or other owned developer space
• Experience creating triage, escalation, or response workflows across large organizations
• Familiarity with developer tools, infrastructure, observability, security, AI, or open source
• Experience using automation or AI to scale monitoring and engagement
• An existing developer audience or active participation in technical communities
• Strong instincts around short-form technical content and video