Solutions Engineers at Datadog are the technical point of contact for our customers. That means they have to stay on top of what’s going on within the company and outside to best answer our customers’ needs.
Océane has been a Solutions Engineer, both in our NY and Paris offices for a year now. Like several others on the Solutions Engineering team, she chose to shift her career completely out of Project Management and get into the tech world. What attracted her to the role was a combination of customer engagement, product and feature enhancement, working with technologies and in a fast paced environment, as well as great team collaboration.
“The first weeks at Datadog were so intense coming from a whole different world … sure I had learned about Linux, Ruby or SQL queries at home, but that was definitely taking this to the next level..”
After a few days, they’re assigned tickets to deal with. Those are the way customers request assistance on any part of the product. They handle issues on all items, from an Agent or Integrations configuration, to a Dashboard/metric visualization issue or alerting bugs. That requires much investigation and multi-tasking – understanding of the client needs/issue, diving into the source code, fixing some bugs when needed and interactions with other Engineers.
“I was used to multi-tasking, digging new information and interacting with people within and out of the organisation in my previous jobs, but doing this while learning about new tech everyday is very exciting on a daily basis”
Teamwork and self improvement are also heavily encouraged by sharing information through the Datadog Documentation articles and focusing on side projects and feature releases.
“We’re also constantly in contact with customers, thanks to the chat system and technical calls. We get to really see first-hand the potential product enhancements as customers will always push to see something new fitting their needs. We also provide them with short term workarounds, which helps us develop a very detailed knowledge of the product.”
As a team commitment to grow our Solutions Engineers’ skill set, several projects have been put in place. One of them is embedding. For a sprint period of two weeks, the Solutions Engineer will be fully integrated into another engineering team, and will be assigned projects like other developers in the team. That allows the Solutions team to get a more hands-on experience with the technologies used internally, the engineering challenges in building Datadog and the design choices made to address those challenges. It’s also a great opportunity to get to know new people within the company. On a more regular basis, Solutions Engineers are encouraged to take on side projects as soon as they are fully ramped up. Examples could be to improve the Demo Environment account or automate parts of our internal processes.
“What’s also great about being a Solutions Engineer at Datadog is that we are encouraged to continuously improve, regularly taking on some coding projects and implement new features to the products, and we can customize the path according to people affinity towards Engineering, Product Management or Sales Engineering.”
We’re hiring Solutions Engineers in our New York and Paris offices, and remote! If you’re interested, feel free to apply on our careers page. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
