AI Research Engineer (AI)

Location: Paris, France; hybrid work

Company

Datadog is a global SaaS business that provides cloud observability, infrastructure monitoring, and security solutions.

What you will do

• Build and operate multimodal data pipelines, ML training and evaluation infrastructure, benchmarks, and internal tooling.
• Implement models and run large-scale experiments while profiling reliability, performance, and cost.
• Build simulation environments and replay infrastructure for autonomous agent training and evaluation.
• Orchestrate distributed training and reinforcement learning with Ray, including scheduling, scaling, and failure recovery.
• Establish automated benchmarks and regression tests for world models, agent performance, and simulation fidelity.
• Collaborate with Research Scientists, Product, and Engineering to integrate research capabilities into reliable Datadog services and contribute to publications and open-source artifacts.

Requirements

• Depth in distributed computing, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and ML systems for training and inference at scale.
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with a systems language such as Rust, C++, or Go.
• Practical experience operating ML training and inference systems with PyTorch or JAX, including containerization, orchestration, and GPU acceleration.
• Experience with large-scale model training and fine-tuning, including SFT, RLVR, RLHF, quantization, or speculative decoding.
• Comfort with modern cloud and data infrastructure and the ability to explain technical and performance trade-offs clearly.
• Experience supporting or contributing to research publications.

Nice to have

• Experience with Ray, Slurm, or similar distributed computing frameworks.
• Software engineering experience in observability, SRE, or security.
• Experience bridging research prototypes with product applications involving foundation models, world models, or RL-trained agents.
• Hands-on GPU programming and optimization experience, including CUDA.
• Experience building production data pipelines or simulation environments for agent training.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive benefits that vary by country of employment and employment arrangement.
• New-hire stock equity through RSUs and an employee stock purchase plan.
• Collaboration with colleagues across Datadog offices in New York City and Paris.
• Opportunities to attend and present at conferences and meetups.
• Mentor and buddy programs, employee resource groups, and an inclusive company culture.