AI Research Scientist - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)

About the role

As a Research Scientist on our team, you will partner with Research Engineers, working on fundamental research problems and collaborating with Datadog's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into products. Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., Bits AI, Bits Evolve, and our time series foundation model), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security. We are focused on two research areas: World Models for Observability -- Training multimodal foundation models that learn the joint dynamics of distributed systems across metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events.

What you’ll do

• Conduct research in generative AI and machine learning, building specialized foundation models and trained agents for observability
• Train multimodal models on large-scale, diverse telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces, topology, events) using distributed training infrastructure
• Design and build simulated environments and RL training loops for on-policy agent training and evaluation
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering) to integrate capabilities like multimodal world modeling and autonomous agents into Datadog's products
• Stay at the forefront of foundation models, world models, and RL-based agent research
• Contribute to research publications, present at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), and help open-source key model artifacts and benchmarks

What they’re looking for

Select a requirement to inspect fit, evidence or application context.

• You hold a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, with deep expertise in areas like generative modeling, world models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, or multimodal learning (or have equivalent experience)
• You have extensive experience designing and implementing deep learning models and agents, with a strong background in distributed training frameworks (e.g., DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM) and ML libraries (PyTorch)
• You have a track record of impactful publications at top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, TMLR)
• You are familiar with efficient training, post-training, and inference techniques for large foundation models
• You can explain complex models and research findings to both technical and non-technical audiences

Helpful, not always essential

• Experience bridging research and real-world product applications, especially with large foundation models, world models, or RL-trained agents
• Passion for pushing the boundaries of AI with a focus on customer impact and scalable deployment
• Experience writing production data pipelines and applications
• Hands-on experience with GPU programming and optimization, including CUDA

Benefits & working conditions

• Competitive global benefits
• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Opportunity to collaborate closely with colleagues across the Datadog offices in New York City and Paris
• Opportunity to attend and present at conferences and meetups
• Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
• An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)
• Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.