Senior Applied Scientist - AI Platform

About the role

Own the applied science direction for GenSim: set the methodology and the forward-looking technical calls on how simulated environments and post-training data should be built, on a team where that decision-making does not exist yet.

What they’re looking for

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

• You have a PhD, MS or equivalent research experience in a scientific field, with strong applied mathematics grounding.
• 6+ years of relevant applied science or ML engineering experience, including setting technical direction for others.
• You have hands-on experience with LLM and agent post-training data: how it is created, managed, and how training-data quality is controlled. This is the requirement that matters most.
• You have real domain expertise in LLMs and agentic applications — not classical ML fine-tuning. Fine-tuning classifiers or traditional models is a different problem from the one this team is solving.
• You have evaluated agents or LLM applications, and can define what 'good' means before you measure it.
• You are a strong programmer and production software engineer. Python at minimum, plus the ability to ship scalable production systems and work with distributed systems.
• You collaborate well across engineering and science teams, and you're comfortable being the domain expert who decides what comes next.
• You thrive in ambiguity and can make sound technical calls when the path isn't yet defined.

Helpful, not always essential

• Hands-on LLM fine-tuning, post-training or model training experience.
• Background in statistics, experiment design and data analysis.
• Experience deploying production-level ML infrastructure.
• Observability or monitoring systems background.
• Architecture-level understanding of LLMs.

Benefits & working conditions

• New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
• Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
• Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
• An inclusive company culture and the ability to join our Community Guilds
• Access to Inclusion Talks, our internal panel discussions
• Free, global Spring Health benefits for employees and dependents age 6+
• Competitive global benefits
• Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.
• #LI-Hybrid