Olivier Pomel

Olivier Pomel is a French-born software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Datadog in 2010 with Alexis Lê-Quôc, building what has become the leading cloud monitoring and observability platform used by tens of thousands of organisations to track the health, performance and security of their infrastructure, applications and data systems. Before Datadog, Pomel worked as a director of engineering at Wireless Generation (later Amplify), where frustration with fragmented, siloed monitoring tools inspired the idea for a unified observability product.

Under Pomel's leadership as chief executive, Datadog grew from a niche infrastructure-monitoring startup into a critical piece of the modern cloud and data stack, expanding well beyond its original server-monitoring roots into application performance monitoring, log management, security monitoring, and, increasingly, observability for AI and machine-learning systems. The company completed its initial public offering on the Nasdaq in 2019 and has since become one of the most consistently high-growth companies in enterprise software.

Pomel has been notably vocal about open-source software's role in DevOps and cloud infrastructure, and about the practical realities of operating reliable systems at scale — themes reflected in Datadog's continual expansion into new categories, including database monitoring, cloud cost management, and LLM observability tools designed to help enterprises track and govern their growing AI workloads.

As data and AI infrastructure has become more complex and distributed, Datadog's platform — and Pomel's stewardship of it — has taken on outsized importance: enterprises now rely on Datadog's dashboards and alerting to understand not just server health but the behaviour of the data pipelines and AI models increasingly embedded in their products. In 2026, Pomel has continued to lead the company while periodically executing scheduled share sales as part of ongoing personal financial planning, standard practice for long-tenured founder-CEOs of public companies.

Pomel's influence stems from making observability — the practice of understanding what complex systems are actually doing — a mainstream discipline. As data volumes and system complexity have exploded, the tools he built have become essential infrastructure for any organisation trying to keep its data and AI systems reliable and trustworthy.