Director, Engineering - Platform Security

We are seeking an experienced Director of Platform Security Engineering to lead and scale our security functions across the code-to-cloud ecosystem. This role will oversee Cloud Security, Application Security, SDLC Security, and will integrate  AI security as a core component of all three practices. 

As Director, you will be accountable for building and guiding teams that protect the entire platform layer spanning infrastructure, services, and applications while ensuring secure design, deployment, and operations. You will partner closely with engineering, product, and compliance leaders to embed security into the platform’s architecture and development lifecycle, driving innovation and resilience at scale.

In this position, you will be a key decision maker within a forward-looking organization that integrates Security and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) into a unified structure. You will set the strategy, foster cross-functional collaboration, and establish security as a core enabler of reliability and trust across the platform.

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 will do: 

You will lead teams solving some of the hardest security engineering challenges at scale, enabling developers to move quickly and safely while ensuring the resilience and trustworthiness of our core systems.

• Define and deliver the engineering roadmap for a zero trust architecture, configuring identity, access, secrets management, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Develop strategy to harden runtime environments by enforcing least-privilege execution, isolation, and service-to-service policy to systematically reduce application risk and shrink exploitable exposure.
• Architect and build secure access and usage of Cloud Services and Resources for engineers to build their services with.
• Architect and operate scalable, fault-tolerant security services that integrate into platform infrastructure, enabling security for application and AI agent services.
• Lead a team responsible for safeguarding Datadog’s AI model environments.
  
  
• Partner with SRE and platform teams to ensure resilience, observability, and scalability of core security services.
• Own the security platform as a product, delivering on automated guardrails, policy-as-code, and self-service security that integrate seamlessly into engineering workflows, and prove impact through risk-based metrics (control coverage, risk exposure, MTTR, exploit block rate).
• Build and maintain secure defaults across the software development lifecycle (source control, pipelines, artifact registries, dependency management).

• Develop automation and reusable services for code scanning, dependency monitoring, and vulnerability management.
• Deliver secure guardrails for AI-powered developer tools (e.g., code validation, sensitive data protection, prompt injection resilience).

Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead and mentor multiple engineering teams, ensuring technical depth, operational rigor, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with product, platform, and AI engineering groups to embed security into developer workflows and CI/CD systems.
• Collaborate with Compliance, Risk, and Threat Intelligence teams to align engineering priorities with regulatory requirements and risk reduction.
• Advocate for secure by design principles  across the engineering organization.

Who You Are: 

• You’ve been responsible for building and/or rolling out cloud infrastructure, network infrastructure
• You have a proven track record of building and scaling engineering organizations as a Director or higher in high-growth, where you fostered a strong security culture and led teams through rapid change.
• You've been able to advocate strong best practices by achieving consensus, gaining accountability where ownership is unclear. 
• You have expertise several of the following areas:
• Identity & Access Management (IAM)
• Secrets management
• Cloud infrastructure hardening & zero-trust networking
• CI/CD pipeline security and source code management
• Supply chain security (artifact signing, container image security, dependency scanning)
• You have a  demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, with outstanding interpersonal and leadership skills that inspire collaboration and drive alignment across teams.
• You’ve developed se