AI Research Scientist - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)

Location: New York, New York, USA

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

Company

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

What you will do

• Conduct research in generative AI and machine learning to build specialized foundation models and trained agents for observability.
• Train multimodal models on large-scale telemetry data, including metrics, logs, traces, topology, and events, using distributed training infrastructure.
• Design simulated environments, reinforcement learning loops, and evaluation infrastructure for autonomous agents.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams to integrate world modeling and autonomous-agent capabilities into Datadog products.
• Advance research in foundation models, world models, and reinforcement learning-based agents.
• Publish research, present at leading conferences, and contribute model artifacts and benchmarks to open source.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Deep expertise in generative modeling, world models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, or multimodal learning.
• Extensive experience designing and implementing deep learning models and agents.
• Strong background in distributed training frameworks such as DeepSpeed or Megatron-LM and ML libraries such as PyTorch.
• Impactful publications at top-tier venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, or TMLR.
• Familiarity with efficient training, post-training, and inference techniques for large foundation models, plus the ability to communicate complex research to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to have

• Experience connecting AI research with real-world product applications and scalable deployment.
• Experience writing production data pipelines and applications.
• Hands-on GPU programming and optimization experience, including CUDA.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive benefits, including healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health support, paid time off, and fitness reimbursement.
• New-hire stock equity, an employee stock purchase plan, and a 401(k) plan with company match.
• Collaboration opportunities with colleagues across Datadog offices in New York City and Paris.
• Conference and meetup attendance and presentation opportunities.
• Mentor and buddy programs, employee resource groups, and an inclusive company culture.