Staff Research Scientist - Foundation & World Models (AI)

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

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

Company

Datadog is a SaaS observability and security platform that provides unified visibility across applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security.

What you will do

• Drive research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning for observability.
• Own research problems from framing and experimentation through model development and evaluation.
• 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.
• Set research standards, review directions, mentor researchers and research engineers, and raise technical quality.
• Collaborate with Research, Product, and Engineering to translate research into scalable Datadog capabilities and contribute to publications, conferences, and open-source artifacts.

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.
• Hands-on experience designing, training, and evaluating large-scale deep learning models.
• Experience driving technically ambitious research at meaningful scale as an individual contributor.
• Demonstrated research impact through publications, significant model or system contributions, 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.

Nice to have

• Experience with multimodal or non-text data.
• Experience with large language models.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, pragmatic, and people-first environment focused on innovation and technical excellence.
• Professional development and continuous growth opportunities.
• Healthcare, dental, parental planning, and mental health benefits.
• 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and discounted employee stock purchase plan.
• Benefits may vary based on the country of employment and the nature of employment.