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Engineering Manager - Red Team (SecOps)

Datadog

Job Description

Posted on: 
February 10, 2025

Summary and company overview

The Red Team operates as part of the Resilience Engineering organization and our goal is to enhance Datadog's security posture and resilience against sophisticated attacks by running simulations to verify our company’s preparedness. These simulations discover technical and cultural risks, verify our operational response capabilities, and assess the real impact of threats before they actually occur. These efforts help us strategically identify the highest priority systemic risks and assets we need to address first.

As an Engineering Manager, you will help us realize this mission by driving cross-functional Purple and Red Team exercises and collaborate with our Blue team partners in SecOps, build tooling to improve the team’s operational efficiency, and take a leading role in not only sharing what we learn from breaking things, but also connect with stakeholders who can fix those systemic problems in order to ensure Datadog is resilient to future attacks.

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.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and mentor a team of passionate Red Teamers dedicated to challenging the company’s defenses to enhance operational preparedness. Foster a culture of resilience by embracing failure as an opportunity to learn and build adaptability.
  • Design and execute intelligence-driven purple- and red-team exercises in collaboration with our internal partners that simulate the most relevant strategic threats to the company. Ensure the output of these exercises are actionable and deliver value to stakeholders.
  • Drive ownership of follow-ups by sharing insights widely to engage engineers in security and supporting teams in addressing systemic weaknesses across our infrastructure and products.
  • Support incident response by helping Security Leads assess threat impact, evaluate blast radius, and understand attacker TTPs. Recreate attack scenarios to validate mitigations where feasible.
  • Work with the leadership across Resilience Engineering to form strategic objectives and leverage these in quarterly planning to ensure the team is focusing on the most important threats to Datadog. Ensure stakeholders are aware of our work and provide them the best experience working with us.
  • Lead hiring efforts to attract and retain top talent, ensuring the growth and development of team members through mentoring and professional development opportunities.

Job Requirements

Required Qualifications:

  • 2-3 years experience as a people manager or as a technical leader with strong mentorship skills. Ideally candidates will have experience in career development, performance management, tracking and optimizing team velocity, OKRs, and hiring.
  • Strong stakeholder management skills. This will involve using your empathy, collaboration, and communication skills in English to work remotely with people across teams.
  • Around 5 years experience in adversary simulation, pentesting, or red teaming. We are also open to candidates from non-traditional backgrounds such as Resilience Engineering, Security Chaos Engineering, or any domain that adopts a mindset of proactively breaking software in order to learn, so long as you also can demonstrate strong security fundamentals.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience with red- and purple-team operations with a strong interest in advocating for the "adversary mindset":
  • creativity and technical breadth in identifying weak links across Datadog (both in our technical and social systems);
  • the courage to break things and push the boundaries of what’s currently known;
  • adaptability and situational awareness to quickly pivot like an attacker would;
  • the willingness to leverage honest answers and alternative perspectives to enable the organisation to adapt and make our defense strategies succeed.
  • Solid security fundamentals, networking and knowledge of distributed systems. While we do not run systems in the critical path, we support and work with teams who do, so we need to leverage our technical experience to build credibility.

Additional commentary

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re passionate about technology and want to grow your skills, we encourage you to apply.

Benefits and Growth:

  • New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
  • Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
  • Intradepartmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
  • An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)
  • Access to Inclusion Talks, our Internal panel discussions
  • Free, global mental health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+
  • Competitive global benefits

Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.

Summary and company overview

The Red Team operates as part of the Resilience Engineering organization and our goal is to enhance Datadog's security posture and resilience against sophisticated attacks by running simulations to verify our company’s preparedness. These simulations discover technical and cultural risks, verify our operational response capabilities, and assess the real impact of threats before they actually occur. These efforts help us strategically identify the highest priority systemic risks and assets we need to address first.

As an Engineering Manager, you will help us realize this mission by driving cross-functional Purple and Red Team exercises and collaborate with our Blue team partners in SecOps, build tooling to improve the team’s operational efficiency, and take a leading role in not only sharing what we learn from breaking things, but also connect with stakeholders who can fix those systemic problems in order to ensure Datadog is resilient to future attacks.

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.

Apply now