I applied online and received a response the next day. I had a 30 minute phone call with the recruiter and a second one with the hiring manager, both of which went well and who I liked. Then I had to complete an engineering challenge.
On my first call with the recruiter, I was really surprised by the salary range the recruiter shared with me; it was the lowest I had heard of for support engineer in San Francisco; especially considering how technical of a solution Datadog is. I know they aren't used to SF salaries, but this was a low number even in NY.
I did not like the engineering challenge they gave me. It was intended to mimic and get set up with their monitoring agent as if I were a new customer. I spent about 30+ hours on this assignment; a significant percentage of that time was just dealing with OS dependency issues. More than anything else, it seemed like busy work. I didn't feel like it was assessing my skills, it was just testing how much time I wanted to spend reading through their documentation, some of which was outdated.
There was no timeframe for when the assessment had to be turned in which was the most frustrating part. This assessment is not at all respectful of candidates time. I was rejected after I turned my assignment in. I invested a significant amount of time into their interview process and didn't even receive any feedback at the end when I asked.