Aidan Friedsam. Software engineer at Datadog. Independent builder for everyone else.
By day, I work on the distributed systems that ingest and serve Datadog’s cloud infrastructure data at massive scale. Outside of that, I build full-stack products, payment systems, and AI features for founders and businesses who need something built right, fast.
What I Build
Products & Platforms
Full-stack products, from architecture to production.
- Requirements → architecture → implementation → deployment → iteration
- Ownership of the whole path, not just the code
Payments & Billing
Stripe-powered billing, subscriptions, and entitlements that actually hold up.
- Subscription paywalls and usage-based / credit systems
- Entitlement and access control
- Billing state integrated with the application database
AI-Powered Features
Production AI, not a chatbot bolted onto a landing page.
- Structured generation workflows
- Asynchronous, batched AI processing
- Designing around inference cost and model integration
Backend & Infrastructure
Auth, APIs, databases — the backend that makes the frontend real.
- Authentication and authorization
- Database-backed applications and third-party integrations
- Email and notification systems
Analytics & Optimization
Instrumentation that turns usage into decisions.
- Behavioral and product analytics
- Conversion tracking and friction identification
- Technical SEO and performance
Engineering at Scale
I work on Datadog’s Referential Data Platform — the systems that ingest, normalize, and serve cloud infrastructure data from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and other providers, at a scale of hundreds of thousands of operations per second. My work sits in distributed, fault-tolerant infrastructure built on Kafka, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and Apache Iceberg — production systems other engineering teams depend on every day.
- 100,000s
- operations per second
- 4+
- cloud providers ingested
- 5
- production datastores
How I Work
You work directly with me — not through layers of account managers. Direct communication, plain English, fast iteration, and real ownership. If an idea won’t work, I’ll tell you why, and explain the tradeoffs without the jargon.
Understand
A plain-English conversation about what you actually need.
Architect
Good technical decisions, made before writing code.
Build
Direct, fast iteration. No account managers, no disappearing for two weeks.
Ship
Production-ready, not a demo.
Iterate
Real usage drives what happens next.
About
I started programming at 14 and was largely self-taught before studying it formally — a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, class of 2025. Today I’m a software engineer at Datadog, and I build software independently for founders and businesses outside of that.
Thousands of hours logged coding since 2020, tracked automatically, because I like data.
