Research Manager (Foundation & World Models)

Location: Paris, France. Hybrid workplace with regular office collaboration.

Company

Datadog provides an observability and security platform that unifies visibility across applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security.

What you will do

• Lead research programs in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning for observability and security.
• Set technical direction while contributing to research strategy, experimentation, model development, and technical problem-solving.
• Train large-scale multimodal models on metrics, logs, traces, topology, events, and other non-text telemetry.
• Advance pre-training, representation learning, world modeling, scaling, and evaluation for complex distributed systems.
• Mentor researchers and research engineers and collaborate with Research, Product, and Engineering teams.
• Publish research, present at conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML, and open-source selected model artifacts and benchmarks.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Deep expertise in foundation models, world models, multimodal learning, generative modeling, or related areas.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, training, or evaluating large-scale deep learning models.
• Demonstrated impact through publications, model or system contributions, research artifacts, or equivalent technical achievements.
• Experience leading, mentoring, and developing researchers or engineers while remaining technically hands-on.
• Ability to communicate complex research findings to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to have

• Experience working with multimodal or non-text data.
• Background in an industry research lab, startup, academic environment, or another research setting.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid workplace designed to support collaboration and work-life harmony.
• New-hire stock equity and employee stock purchase plan.
• Professional development, product training, and career pathing.
• Mentor and buddy programs, employee resource groups, and inclusion initiatives.
• Global health and employee benefits, varying by country of employment and employment conditions.
• Giving programs and competitive country-specific benefits.