# David Mitchell

> Engineering leader in Brooklyn, NY. SVP of Engineering at Datadog. Two decades of experience building and scaling global technology organizations across observability, fintech, edtech, smart cities, and online travel. Also a photographer and maker.

David Mitchell (online handle: Hazrac) is SVP of Engineering at Datadog, where he has led engineering since 2019 — first as VP of Engineering (2019–2024), promoted to SVP in October 2024. As VP he led Datadog's Infrastructure Monitoring and Log Management product engineering teams, encompassing the Datadog Agent, Containers, Processes, Networking, Serverless, and Cloud and Web Integrations. As SVP he retains that scope and additionally leads the Service Management and Bits AI products and the Shared Capabilities group (graphing and data visualization, user management, alerting, and onboarding). He also leads the organizational adoption of coding agents across Datadog engineering.

## Current Role

- **SVP of Engineering, Datadog** (October 2024–present; VP of Engineering November 2019–October 2024), New York City
- Leads Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Management, Service Management, Bits AI, and Shared Capabilities
- Leads the organizational adoption of coding agents across engineering — adoption, training, good practices, new internal tooling, and updates to the interview process and career ladder for AI-assisted development
- Led engineering for the Datadog Agent and its componentization effort, Remote Config (foundation for Fleet Management and Datadog's "platform of action" direction), eBPF platform investment powering Universal Service Monitoring and Service Discovery, and an integrations acceleration program spanning Agent, Cloud, and Web integrations
- Led engineering integration of the Vector acquisition into Log Management / Observability Pipelines
- Organizational contributions: promotion panel design, engineering career matrix, hiring pipeline standardization, director development programs

## Career History

- **CTO, Intersection** (2017–2019) — Alphabet/Sidewalk Labs-backed smart cities company (LinkNYC). Rebuilt the engineering org, shipped a standardized software platform to 10,000+ devices, contributed $30MM+ in new top-line revenue
- **VP of Engineering & Technical Operations, Betterment** (2016–2017) — fintech robo-advisor; data engineering, technical operations, SEC/FINRA compliance
- **SVP of Technical Operations, Amplify / News Corp** (2012–2016) — built technical operations for a K-12 one-to-one education platform from the ground up; 99.9% uptime; delivered the Amplify Appliance end to end
- **Sr. Director of Technical Operations, ideeli** (2011–2012) — flash-sales e-commerce, 5M+ customers
- **Director roles, Sabre Holdings / Travelocity / lastminute.com** (2001–2011) — including Head of EMEA Technical Operations in London, $30M disaster recovery program delivery, and airline platform migrations (Southwest, Aeromexico, Volaris)

## Education

- MBA, Southern Methodist University — Cox School of Business
- Executive Leadership, University of Virginia Darden School of Business

## Expertise

Engineering leadership at scale, organizational design, delegation and team cadence, observability and infrastructure software, agent/endpoint software, eBPF, AI-assisted software development and coding-agent adoption, acquisitions integration, ITIL and compliance (PCI, SOX, SEC/FINRA), disaster recovery, and product-focused engineering culture.

## Personal

Based in Brooklyn, NY. Photographer and maker. Volunteer Crit Advisor for Cornell Tech's Masters Program (2018–present).

## Links

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/hazrac/): Professional profile
- [GitHub](https://github.com/hazrac): Code and maker projects
- [Resume](https://www.hazrac.org/resume/): Full resume in HTML

## Contact

- Email: david+llms@hazrac.org