Staff Research Scientist - Foundation & World Models

As a Staff Research Scientist within Datadog AI Research (DAIR), you will drive fundamental research in foundation models and multimodality as a hands-on individual contributor. You will advance large-scale pre-training and multimodal learning across the diverse signals generated by distributed systems, including metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events. You will help set the technical direction for ambitious research programs, raise the technical bar for the researchers and research engineers around you, and collaborate with Datadog's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into products.

At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them.

What You'll Do:

• Drive research in foundation models and multimodal learning, shaping the technical direction for ambitious research programs grounded in observability and security
• Own research problems end to end, from framing the question through experimentation, model development, and evaluation
• Train large-scale multimodal models on diverse telemetry data, including metrics, logs, traces, topology, events, and other non-text modalities
• Advance approaches to pre-training, representation learning, scaling, and evaluation for models that learn the dynamics of complex distributed systems
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams across Research, Product, and Engineering to translate research advances into scalable Datadog capabilities
• Share research findings with external audiences upon reaching significant project milestones.

Who You Are:

• You hold a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or have equivalent experience, with deep expertise in areas such as foundation models, world models, multimodal learning, or generative modeling
• You have driven technically ambitious research at meaningful scale as an individual contributor, whether in an industry research lab, startup, academic environment, or another research setting
• You have extensive hands-on experience designing, training, or evaluating large-scale deep learning models (such as large language models), with experience in multimodal or non-text data considered a strong plus
• You have a track record of research impact through influential publications, significant model or system contributions, widely used research artifacts, or equivalent technical achievements
• You set technical direction through influence rather than authority, and you have mentored other researchers or engineers and elevated the quality of work around you
• You want to stay deeply hands-on in research for the long term, and you can communicate complex research findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences

Datadog values people from all walks of life. We know not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That’s okay. If you’re passionate about technology and want to grow your experience, we encourage you to apply.

The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at Datadog is: 320000 - 400000 USD