AI Research Engineer - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)

As a Research Engineer on our team, you will partner with Research Scientists to turn research ideas into working systems, building the data, tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid iteration, trustworthy evaluation, and a smooth path from prototype to production.

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. These models power advanced forecasting, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, counterfactual simulation ("what if?"), and provide a learned planning backbone for our autonomous agents.

Trained Agents for Observability-- Post-training models to operate autonomously across Datadog's domain. SRE incident response is our first target, with a clear path to code repair, security response, and infrastructure optimization. We build the simulation environments, RL training loops, and evaluation infrastructure needed to train agents that match or surpass frontier models at a fraction of the cost.

What You'll Do

Build and operate multimodal data pipelines, training and evaluation infrastructure, benchmarks, and internal tooling

Implement models, run experiments at scale, and profile for reliability, performance, and cost

Build simulation environments and replay infrastructure for agent training and evaluation

Orchestrate distributed training and distributed RL with Ray, including scheduling, scaling, and failure recovery

Establish rigorous automated benchmarks and regression tests for world model predictions, agent performance, and simulation fidelity

Collaborate with Research Scientists, Product, and Engineering to integrate capabilities into Datadog's products and to harden prototypes into reliable services

Contribute to research publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), and produce high-quality code, documentation, and open-source artifacts

Who You Are

You have depth in distributed computing, RL Infra, and ML systems for training and inference at scale; experience with Ray, Slurm, or similar frameworks is a plus

You are proficient in Python, familiar with a systems language (e.g., Rust, C++, or Go), and comfortable with modern cloud and data infrastructure

You have practical experience implementing and operating ML training and inference systems (e.g., PyTorch or JAX), including containerization, orchestration, and GPU acceleration

You have practical experience with large-scale model training and fine-tuning, including frameworks like Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, SkyRL, VeRL, or TorchTitan, and techniques such as SFT, RLVR, RLHF, and efficient inference (quantization, speculative decoding)

You can explain design and performance trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

You have experience supporting or contributing to research publications

Bonus Points (any of the following)

You have strong software engineering skills with experience in domains such as observability, SRE, or security

You have experience bridging research prototypes and real-world product applications, especially with large foundation models, world models, or RL-trained agents

You have a passion for pushing the boundaries of AI with a focus on customer impact and scalable deployment

You have hands-on experience with GPU programming and optimization, including CUDA

You have experience writing production data pipelines and applications

You have experience building simulation or sandbox environments for agent training

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re passionate a