Distinguished Architect, AI

About the role

Datadog is expanding the Technical Solutions (TS) organization by seeking a customer-focused, deeply technical Distinguished Architect to join our Product Solutions Architecture (PSA) team. In this role, you will act as a technical multiplier for the world's leading AI labs and AI-native companies. You will bridge the gap between their bleeding-edge infrastructure aspirations and Datadog’s technology roadmap, ensuring our platform natively solves the unique observability challenges of training and deploying foundational models at scale.

What You'll Do

• Leadership: Demonstrate thought leadership in the AI/LLM space. Influence key decision makers and stakeholders by connecting technical capabilities to organizational and business impact.
• Advisory: Strategically partner with highly technical Founders, Heads of Infrastructure, and Research Lead peers. Guide them on best practices and emerging industry trends in the AI/LLM space. Lead high-level technical and architectural conversations around AI adoption.
• Presentations: Lead deep-dive architecture reviews and design engagements with customer teams and their leaders to share industry trends, best practices, and demonstrate how Datadog can support high-throughput hyper scale AI workloads.
• GTM: Identify emerging AI-native technology shifts and feed them directly back to Datadog Product Management. Co-create custom observability integrations and solutions alongside Product SAs to keep Datadog at the absolute forefront of the AI stack.
• Collaboration: Collaborate with Product Solutions Architecture (PSA), Sales, Sales Engineering and Marketing in providing high-quality technical resources to a broad audience of practitioners and economic buyers.
• Hiring: Assist leadership in recruiting and hiring of top talent for the Product Solutions Architecture and Field CTO teams.

Who You Are

• Industry Experience: 10+ years of experience with at-scale distributed systems architecture, high-performance computing, or large-scale infrastructure. Deep familiarity with the AI/LLM ecosystem, accelerator hardware (GPUs/TPUs), and modern orchestration frameworks.
• Strategic Thinker: Able to think long term and creatively about a wide variety of technical and business challenges.
• Stakeholder Management: Proven experience interacting with and influencing elite individual contributors, research scientists, and technical founders in flat, rapid-growth environments.
• Techonologist: A true close-to-the-metal technologist who maintains deep hands-on credibility and can white-board architectural solutions seamlessly with senior engineers. Strong understanding of best practices and real world challenges AI/LLMO.
• Presenter: Excellent customer-facing presentation skills for large audiences, comfortable discussing complex technical details as well as with briefing executives or non-technical personas.
• Communicator: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, ability to link product functionality to business objectives, value realization and ROI.
• Travel: Able to travel via auto, train or air up to 50% of the time
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in engineering or related field, Master’s degree preferred