Backend Engineer (AI Agents)

SUMMARY OF THE ROLE: As a Product Designer at Maze, you'll define what product design looks like for AI agents in cybersecurity — a problem space where the design patterns don't exist yet. This is an early-hire role at a well-funded Series A startup building at the intersection of generative AI and security, and you'll own the product surface end-to-end while working directly with our Head of Product, engineering, and founders. The product challenge is genuinely new. Our AI agents investigate vulnerabilities autonomously, surface findings with real context, and collaborate with security teams to cut through noise. Your job is to design how humans and agents work together — how trust gets built, how decisions get communicated, how complex security workflows become understandable. There's no playbook for this. You'll create one. This role suits someone who operates closer to a product director than a screen-shipper — driving direction, influencing strategy, and making business-impact calls, alongside the visual craft to deliver them. You'll be using AI tools daily to move faster, but your craft is the floor: every design choice should hold up on its own merits, independent of how it was generated. Success looks like a design system shipped and adopted across the product, and concrete product outcomes — feature adoption, POC-to-customer conversion, and customer satisfaction with the experiences you ship. YOUR CONTRIBUTION: * Define AI-Agent UX Patterns: Design how security teams collaborate with autonomous AI agents — how investigations get presented, how trust is established, how humans steer the agent without slowing it down. You're inventing patterns, not applying existing ones. * Drive Product Direction, Not Just Design: Operate as a product-led designer — shaping roadmap, challenging requirements, influencing leadership with research and business reasoning. The bar is "what should we build, and why" alongside "how should it look." * Own the Product Surface End-to-End: Take features from problem framing through shipped product, working in tight partnership with PMs and engineers — including backend. Run discovery, prototype rapidly, validate with customers, and stay close to implementation. No throwing designs over the wall, no shipping around the engineering team. * Build the Design System: Create and scale a component-based design system that becomes the foundation for everything we ship. Establish patterns for AI-human collaboration that the team can build on as we grow. * Pioneer AI-Assisted Design Workflows: Use AI tools to accelerate ideation, prototyping, and exploration — and develop the methodologies the rest of the team will adopt. Your daily workflow is itself a contribution. * Translate Research Into Design: Run customer research, talk to security teams directly, and turn what you learn into shipped product. Use AI-assisted analysis to move from insight to prototype in days, not weeks. * Set the Quality Bar: Establish what "good" looks like for product design at Maze across craft, consistency, and customer impact — as the foundation for a design team that scales behind you. WHAT YOU NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL: * Visual Craft for Data-Dense UI: A portfolio that holds up to detailed scrutiny — strong colour theory, deliberate visual hierarchy, considered information architecture for complex workflows. This is the bar, not a nice-to-have. Your interview will dig into specific design choices and why you made them. * Product Design Track Record: 4-7 years of professional product design experience, with shipped work in B2B SaaS. We're flexible on years; demonstrated craft and clear ownership matter more than time served. * Data-Heavy B2B Interfaces: Direct experience designing for complex workflows, dense data, and technical audiences. Dashboards, investigation tools, developer products, security platforms — the kind of UI where information density and decision support actually matter. * AI as Tool, Not Crutch: You use AI tools (Figma AI, Cursor, v0, Midjourney, ChatGPT/Claude, etc.) as part of your daily workflow and can speak credibly to what they're good for and where they break down. Critically, every design choice you ship should hold up on its own — AI accelerates your work, it doesn't substitute for foundational craft. * Product-Strategic Thinking: Track record of driving product direction, not just executing on briefs. You've influenced what to build with research, framed problems for leadership, and made business-impact calls — ideally in environments where you operated without a dedicated PM. * Deep Engineering Collaboration: Demonstrable history of shipping work in tight partnership with engineers — including backend. Pairing on implementation, working in design tokens, understanding the systems your designs land in, building consensus rather than shipping around resistance. * Design Systems Experience: Background building or meaningfully contributing to a design system in a production product. You think in components, tokens, and patterns, not one-off screens. * Customer-Led Approach: Comfortable running discovery directly with users, synthesising what you hear, and using that to make calls about what to build. You don't wait for research to be handed to you. * Nice to haves: * Experience designing for cybersecurity, developer tools, or other technical product domains * Background designing agentic or AI-native product experiences (not just AI features bolted onto existing products) * Early-stage startup experience where you've operated without a manager or established design function WHY JOIN US: * Define a New Design Space: AI agents in security is a genuinely new problem. The interaction patterns, trust models, and workflows don't exist yet — you'll create them. The work you do here will influence how this entire category gets designed. * Fast-Track to Design Leadership: This is a founding-trajectory role and we're hiring for someone who wants a long-term home, not a stepping stone. As the team scales, the natural path is IC → Lead → Head of Design. If you have leadership ambitions, you'll have the runway to grow into them. If you'd rather stay deeply hands-on, the IC scope grows with the product. * Ambitious Challenge: We're using generative AI (LLMs and agents) to solve one of the most pressing problems in cybersecurity — the gap between vulnerability findings and meaningful action. You'll be designing at the cutting edge of this field. * Expert Team: Work alongside hands-on leaders with experience in Big Tech and Scale-ups. Our team has been part of the leadership teams behind multiple acquisitions and an IPO. * Impactful Work: Cybersecurity is a force for good. The experiences you design will directly affect how security teams protect organisations worldwide. * Build an AI-Native Company: We're building a new company in the AI era with the opportunity to design everything from the ground up — including how the design function itself works. You'll help pioneer AI-assisted design practices and set new standards.

We’re building a new team building to bring the power of Datadog to developers within AI-focused Developer workflows such as AI agents like Cursor, Claude code, GitHub Copilot and Datadog’s native AI agents. We’re looking for product-minded engineers who are excited about developer tools, SDLC improvements and AI in general to help us quickly define and ship features and tools that make all Datadog customers 10x developers. 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.   What You’ll Do:  * Work on agents, prompts, evals, MCPs and direct agent tools from ideation to productization, for allowing Datadog to help companies and developers to maximize the benefit of their integration with Datadog * Help conceptualize and build innovative User flows and experiences within Datadog’s user space and different extensions  * Prototype and see what works well in the real world, iterate closely with our users, and then ship * Follow the latest research on LLM prompt optimization, agents, and code editing. * Support other Datadog product teams to help them build and productionize their developer-focused AI Workflows. For example, you’ll work with the Live Debugger team to create an agentic production debugging experience, delivering on the vision of  “one click to reproduce” for production errors.   Who You Are:  * You’re a backend engineer with at least 5 years of professional experience who values code simplicity and performance. You’ve shipped software that uses LLMs to production * You are passionate about Generative AI and its ability to help software engineers be more productive * You have relevant experience with Large Language Models, large-scale systems and data sets, machine learning, or adjacent fields * You are a great community ambassador and can drive hard technical conversations towards a pragmatic solution * You want to work in a fast, high-growth startup environment that respects its engineers and customers * You have experience writing classic or AI oriented developer tools(such as IDEs, static code analysis, SDLC tools etc). * You have a BS/MS/PhD in a Computer Science, Engineering or related scientific field or equivalent experience 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. #LI-Hybrid ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- About Datadog:  Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across the technology stack to manage complexity at scale. It brings applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security into one place, using AI to detect and resolve issues before they impact customers. Trusted globally by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth AI leaders, Datadog enables businesses to move faster with clarity and confidence. Learn more about #DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Equal Opportunity at Datadog: Datadog is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and other characteristics protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.  Datadog endeavors to make our Careers Page accessible to all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please complete this form. This form is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.  Privacy and AI Guidelines: Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice. For information on our AI policy, please visit Interviewing at Datadog AI Guidelines.