Datadog SME-Chicago, IL (Hybrid)

Role : Datadog SME
Location: Chicago, IL (2 to 3 days in office expected)

Inviting applications for the role of Datadog SME Azure Application Observability Onboarding

In this role, you will onboard existing Azure-hosted applications onto the Datadog platform by instrumenting services for metrics, logs, traces, and profiling, and by deploying and configuring Datadog Agents and Azure integrations across subscriptions, AKS clusters, App Services, and virtual machine estates. You will assess each application's current monitoring footprint in Azure Monitor and Application Insights to determine whether telemetry should be forwarded as-is, re-instrumented natively with Datadog APM tracing libraries, or routed through OpenTelemetry, then build the dashboards, SLOs, and monitors that make the onboarded service production-ready wiring alerts into ServiceNow for incident creation and Microsoft Teams for team notification, and handing over to the owning application team with tagging and documentation that stands up to audit.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on expertise onboarding Azure-hosted applications onto Datadog, including:
• Datadog Agent deployment and configuration across Azure VMs, AKS (Helm chart and Datadog Operator), App Service and Container Apps site extensions, and Azure Functions
• Azure Native Datadog integration and/or App Registration based setup for metric collection across subscriptions and management groups
• Azure platform log forwarding via Diagnostic Settings, Event Hubs, and the Datadog log forwarder
• APM and distributed tracing instrumentation using Datadog tracing libraries (.NET, Java, Python, Node.js) auto-instrumentation plus custom spans
• Log collection, parsing pipelines, grok processors, facets, and log-to-metric generation
• Unified service tagging (env, service, version) mapped to Azure resource tags, subscriptions, and resource groups for a consistent taxonomy across onboarded apps
• Intermediate to advanced proficiency building Datadog observability assets, including:
• Dashboards, timeboards, and notebooks
• Monitors (metric, log, APM, anomaly, composite) with actionable thresholds and low noise
• SLOs, error budgets, and service-level dashboards
• Alert routing into ServiceNow (incident and change integration, correct assignment groups, priority and CMDB mapping) and Microsoft Teams (channel notifications, @mentions, escalation workflows), plus downtime and maintenance windows aligned to change calendars
• Working knowledge of the Azure platform Datadog is onboarded onto, including:
• Azure Monitor, Application Insights, Log Analytics, and how they map to Datadog equivalents
• Core Azure services App Service, AKS, Functions, SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Storage, Service Bus, Event Hubs, API Management, Application Gateway
• Azure identity and access concepts Entra ID, service principals, managed identities, and RBAC scoping for monitoring access
• AKS, containers, and CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions
• Infrastructure-as-code for repeatable rollout Terraform (Datadog and AzureRM providers), Bicep/ARM, Helm
• OpenTelemetry collectors and vendor-neutral instrumentation concepts
• Practical understanding of migration from incumbent tools (Azure Monitor alert rules, Application Insights, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk, ELK, SCOM) and mapping legacy dashboards and alerts to Datadog equivalents
• Awareness of Datadog cost drivers host, custom metric, log indexing, and APM span volumes along with Azure egress and Event Hub throughput considerations, and the levers used to keep ingest efficient
• Strong scripting, query, and troubleshooting skills, including PowerShell, Python or Bash, Azure CLI, the Datadog API, and Datadog query syntax for metrics and logs
• Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to run onboarding sessions with application teams and document standards, runbooks, and handover artefacts

Qualifications we seek in you!

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor's Degree required. Preferably in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field.

4 7 years of experience in observability, monitoring, SRE, DevOps, or application support, with hands-on Datadog delivery experience on Azure-hosted workloads.

Preferred Qualifications

Datadog certification (Fundamentals, APM, or Log Management).

Microsoft Azure certification (AZ-104, AZ-204, or AZ-400).

Experience onboarding applications at scale across multiple Azure subscriptions or a multi-organization Datadog tenant.

Experience building or maintaining Datadog ServiceNow incident integrations and Teams-based alerting workflows in an ITIL-aligned environment.

Exposure to Datadog Watchdog, Synthetic Monitoring, RUM, or Cloud Security Management.