David Obstler

Chief Financial Officer Datadog

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

David Obstler is Chief Financial Officer of Datadog, the observability and security platform that monitors cloud infrastructure, applications and logs for engineering teams. He has held the role since Datadog announced his appointment in November 2018, which means he ran the finance organisation through the company’s September 2019 initial public offering and every year of its growth as a public company since. He brings more than three decades of operational finance experience, over two of them in technology, and an earlier career on the other side of the table in investment banking at JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. Before Datadog he was a serial chief financial officer — at TravelClick, OpenLink Financial, MSCI, RiskMetrics Group and Pinnacor — a run concentrated in financial data and trading software, businesses that resemble Datadog in one important way: they sell a subscription to data infrastructure that customers become structurally dependent on. He also sits on the boards of Braze and Rokt, chairing the latter’s audit committee.

Career Highlights

• Chief Financial Officer of Datadog since November 2018, taking the company through its September 2019 initial public offering and its subsequent scaling as a public company.
• Appointed to the board of directors of Rokt on 15 November 2025 as Chair of the Audit Committee, having advised the board since 2021, as part of a deliberate build-out of public-company-grade governance ahead of a possible listing.
• Appointed to the board of directors of Braze in 2021.
• Held five chief financial officer posts before Datadog — TravelClick, OpenLink Financial, MSCI Inc., RiskMetrics Group and Pinnacor — spanning travel technology, trading and risk software, and financial data and index businesses.
• Built and scaled global finance and infrastructure operations at both public and private high-growth companies, which is precisely the experience Datadog’s chief executive cited on hiring him.
• Started his career in investment banking, with positions at JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs.

Professional Journey

Obstler began in investment banking, working at JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. That grounding shaped the second half of his career, in which he has repeatedly been the finance chief brought in to make a company legible to capital markets — whether that meant preparing it for a sale, a listing, or the ordinary discipline of reporting to institutional investors.

He moved into operating finance and became chief financial officer of a succession of companies: Pinnacor, RiskMetrics Group, MSCI Inc., OpenLink Financial and TravelClick. Four of those five sit in or near financial infrastructure — risk analytics, index and data provision, and trading and treasury software — and the two most closely related of them, RiskMetrics and MSCI, are connected by MSCI’s acquisition of RiskMetrics in 2010. TravelClick, his most recent post before Datadog, took him into hospitality technology, where he led global financial operations.

Datadog announced his appointment as Chief Financial Officer on 5 November 2018. Co-founder and chief executive Olivier Pomel framed the hire around twenty-plus years of building and scaling global infrastructure and finance operations at high-growth companies both public and private — which was the immediate requirement, since Datadog went public less than a year later, in September 2019. He has stayed through the whole of the company’s public life, a longer tenure than is usual for a technology chief financial officer, and the finance organisation he built has had to keep pace with a business whose revenue is consumption-based and therefore harder to forecast than a seat-based subscription.

Alongside the executive role he has taken on governance work. He joined the board of Braze in 2021. He also began advising Rokt’s board that year, and on 15 November 2025 formally joined Rokt’s board of directors as Chair of its Audit Committee — an appointment the company positioned as part of building a board to the standard expected of a listed technology company, with an eventual public offering in view.

Education

Yale University

Bachelor of Arts

Harvard Business School

Master of Business Administration