Datadog

$ pwd
/Datadog/SecurityEngineering

I am a month into my new role at Datadog as a Security Engineer. Now is a good time for me to write this post so I could finally tell folks where I am, my onboarding and contributions experience so far, and also keep it real about the ‘n’ things that happen when you change your job. Deciding to make this career move wasn’t easy. It required quite a bit of reflection and preparation. I particularly recommend this approach for anyone looking to figure out their own.

There are a few reasons that led me to Datadog-

  1. I’ve firsthand seen how complex data-intensive and/or cloud-native distributed systems have gotten. Making sense of how things work in the grand scheme of things needs better observability. I’ve been fascinated by the security and privacy aspects in particular. It’s something I deeply care about as a user of technology. Hence, the combination of observability and security appealed to me.
  2. Hypergrowth. Learnings, Learnings, Tons of Learnings.
  3. Culture. By now I acknowledge that this is prime for growth.

With Datadog, I particularly liked how the company cared about my interview experience, provided support throughout the process, and most importantly the involvement of my manager throughout.

In my first week, I attended a week-long onboarding in the NYC office, experienced the awesome office dynamics, and met with different folks from the sales, engineering, and security organizations. Week 2 was co-incidentally the company-wide learning week with over 40 unique sessions. I am impressed by the sense of community and learning culture at the company.

As for my new role, I’ll be focusing on software security, primarily engineering the tooling and processes to scale security design and guidance. It’s something I am deeply interested in as technology and software engineering continues to evolve. These are the things I’ll be prioritizing- doing more, different, interesting, and difficult things while pacing myself. All while building a network of peers.

There’s certainly a huge amount of rapid learning and I look forward to writing more to share my knowledge, learnings, and thoughts.