Staff Research Scientist - Post-Training for Agents (AI)

Location: New York, New York, USA, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Salary: $320,000–$400,000 USD per year, plus equity and potentially variable compensation.

Company

Datadog is a SaaS company providing observability and security products that unify visibility across applications, infrastructure, data, models, and technology stacks.

What you will do

• Drive research in agent post-training and reinforcement learning for observability and security applications.
• Own research projects from problem formulation through experimentation, model development, and evaluation.
• Design reinforcement learning methods, post-training approaches, and training loops for agents operating in complex environments.
• Build simulated environments, synthetic data generation methods, and evaluation frameworks for scalable agent training.
• Set research direction, review technical work, mentor researchers and research engineers, and promote rigorous experimentation.
• Collaborate with Research, Product, and Engineering teams to turn autonomous-agent advances into scalable Datadog capabilities.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Deep expertise in reinforcement learning, AI agents, post-training, generative modeling, or related areas.
• Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning systems, agent training methods, simulated environments, synthetic data pipelines, or evaluation frameworks.
• Evidence of research impact through publications, model or system contributions, widely used research artifacts, or equivalent achievements.
• Experience setting technical direction through influence, mentoring researchers or engineers, and communicating complex findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work from New York, New York, USA, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Nice to have

• Research publications at conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, or ICML.
• Experience open-sourcing model artifacts and benchmarks.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, pragmatic, people-first environment focused on professional development, innovation, and research excellence.
• Healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits.
• 401(k) plan and company match.
• Paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and discounted employee stock purchase plan.
• Competitive equity package and potential variable compensation.