AI Research Scientist - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)

<p>As a Research Scientist on our team, you will partner with Research Engineers, working on fundamental research problems and collaborating with Datadog's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into products.</p> <p> </p> <p>Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/bits-ai-sre/">Bits AI</a>, <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/self-optimizing-system/">Bits Evolve</a>, and our <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/ai/toto-boom-unleashed/">time series foundation model</a>), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security.</p> <p> </p> <p>We are focused on two research areas:</p> <p> </p> <ol> <li><strong>World Models for Observability</strong> -- Training multimodal foundation models that learn the joint dynamics of distributed systems across metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events. These models power advanced forecasting, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, counterfactual simulation ("what if?"), and provide a learned planning backbone for our autonomous agents.</li> <li><strong>Trained Agents for Observability </strong>-- Post-training models to operate autonomously across Datadog's domain. SRE incident response is our first target, with a clear path to code repair, security response, and infrastructure optimization. We build the simulation environments, RL training loops, and evaluation infrastructure needed to train agents that match or surpass frontier models at a fraction of the cost.</li> </ol> <p> </p> <p><strong>What You'll Do:</strong></p> <p> </p> <ul> <li>Conduct research in generative AI and machine learning, building specialized foundation models and trained agents for observability</li> <li>Train multimodal models on large-scale, diverse telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces, topology, events) using distributed training infrastructure</li> <li>Design and build simulated environments and RL training loops for on-policy agent training and evaluation</li> <li>Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering) to integrate capabilities like multimodal world modeling and autonomous agents into Datadog's products</li> <li>Stay at the forefront of foundation models, world models, and RL-based agent research</li> <li>Contribute to research publications, present at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), and help open-source key model artifacts and benchmarks</li> </ul> <p> </p> <p><strong>Who You Are:</strong></p> <p> </p> <ul> <li>You hold a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, with deep expertise in areas like generative modeling, world models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, or multimodal learning (or have equivalent experience)</li> <li>You have extensive experience designing and implementing deep learning models and agents, with a strong