David Mitchell

SVP of Engineering, Datadog · Brooklyn, NY · LinkedIn · David+aboutme@hazrac.org

A highly technical leader with strong business acumen, international experience, and a proven record of growing and maturing global technology organizations to meet business demands. Two decades of experience designing technology solutions, supporting practices, and establishing culture that lead to reliable product delivery — from major online travel companies like Travelocity and lastminute.com, to startups like Amplify and Intersection, to leading engineering at Datadog through hypergrowth.

Experience

Datadog — New York, NY

Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for cloud applications.

SVP of Engineering (October 2024–present) VP of Engineering (November 2019–October 2024)

As VP, led Datadog's Infrastructure Monitoring and Log Management product engineering teams — this encompassed the Datadog Agent, Containers, Processes, Networking, Serverless, and Cloud and Web Integrations. Promoted to SVP in 2024, retaining that scope and adding our Service Management and Bits AI products, and the Shared Capabilities group (graphing and data visualization, user management, alerting and onboarding).

• Lead the organizational adoption of coding agents across engineering: driving adoption and training, establishing good practices, building new internal tools, and updating both the interview process and the engineering career ladder for AI-assisted development
• Initiated and drove the componentization of the Datadog Agent, improving testing, ownership clarity, and release predictability across 130+ Agent releases
• Sponsored Remote Config from inception, establishing the risk-review framework that enabled it to ship safely; Remote Config now underpins Fleet Management, single-step APM onboarding, remote Agent upgrades, and Datadog's evolution toward a "platform of action"
• Championed and scaled Datadog's eBPF investment, establishing a dedicated eBPF platform team that powers Universal Service Monitoring and Service Discovery
• Led the engineering integration of the Vector acquisition, forming the basis of the Observability Pipelines product
• Oversaw delivery of new products including Network Device Monitoring, Cloud Cost Management, Universal Service Monitoring, Observability Pipelines, Sensitive Data Scanner, and Log Workspaces
• Defined the product-delivery operating cadence used across my teams (fortnightly demos for early products, 6-week business reviews as products mature)
• Broad organizational contributions: designed Promotion Panels v1.0, updated the engineering Career Matrix, standardized Hiring Pipelines, and sponsored the initial Director Summit
• Executive sponsor on major customer engagements, including Expedia and PayPal

Intersection — New York, NY

Intersection is the leading Smart Cities company, funded by Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs. Products include the Link kiosk (LinkNYC), the IxNConnect content platform, and Place Exchange.

Chief Technology Officer (2017–2019)

• Refocused and rebuilt 20% of the engineering team in 6 months, enabling the launch of a new business and 3 new products the following year — a standardized software platform deployed to 10,000+ devices worldwide, contributing over $30MM in new top-line revenue
• Led stability efforts to refactor the Link platform, including renegotiating with board members, investors, and hardware manufacturers
• Transformed the culture from media-focused to engineering- and product-focused: quarterly product planning, a yearly hackathon, company-wide sprint showcases, and D&I-inclusive hiring while adding 20 engineers in 2018 alone
• Cut release cycles from weeks to days via CI/CD standardization and automated testing; deployed dynamic 911 failover between VOIP and LTE

Betterment — New York, NY

Betterment is the leading fintech robo-advisor, with over $16B AUM and 400K+ customers at the time.

VP of Engineering and Technical Operations (2016–2017)

• Responsible for Data Engineering, Technical Operations, and an Operations Efficiency team
• Established processes to meet SEC and FINRA compliance obligations; represented IT in a 2016 FINRA audit
• Built the Operations Efficiency team, whose customer-service tooling maintained a 15,000:1 customer-to-service-manager ratio

Amplify / News Corp — Brooklyn, NY

Amplify is a digital education company serving K-12 schools across all 50 states; a subsidiary of News Corporation.

SVP of Operations, Amplify Access (2015–2016) · SVP of Technical Operations (2015) · VP of Technical Operations, Access Division (2012–2014)

• One of three initial technical leaders founding the Amplify Access division; built DevOps, Implementation Services, and Customer Service from the ground up for an Android-based one-to-one K-12 platform
• Maintained 99.9% uptime of centralized services, including disaster recovery compensating for EC2 regional outages and continuous delivery enabling daily deploys
• Designed and delivered the Amplify Appliance end to end, including managing the ODM building the hardware
• Promoted to SVP to integrate three divisions' IT Operations teams into one; migrated 1,200 legacy VMs from a physical datacenter to AWS

ideeli — New York, NY

Sr. Director of Technical Operations (2011–2012)

• Ran three teams delivering corporate and website IT operations for a flash-sales platform serving 5M+ customers at 1,000 requests/second peak
• Led cost-savings efforts totaling $500K/year within the first 7 months

Sabre Holdings / Travelocity / lastminute.com

Director of Enterprise Operations and IT Continuity, Sabre — Southlake, TX (2009–2011) Delivered a $30M reinvestment in Sabre's disaster recovery solution; migrated Southwest Airlines, Aeromexico, and Volaris onto Sabre platforms.

Head of EMEA Technical Operations, lastminute.com — London, UK (2006–2009) Ran a 2-year transformation program for Travelocity's European division; reduced operating budget by £6M/year and unified the project portfolio under a central PMO.

Director of Systems Engineering, Travelocity — Southlake, TX (2004–2006) Created a follow-the-sun operations model spanning the US and a new Sydney office.

Information Security Officer, Travelocity — San Francisco, CA (2001–2004)

Volunteering

Cornell Tech — Crit Advisor for Cornell Tech's Masters Program (2018–present)

Education

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