AI Research Scientist – Datadog AI Research (DAIR)

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. 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

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

Who You Are

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

Bonus Points (any of the following)

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

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 about technology and want to grow your skills, we encourage you to apply.

Benefits and Growth

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)

Ben