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Staff Research Scientist - Foundation & World Models

Datadog· Datadog AI Research (DAIR)
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New York, NY, Pittsburgh, PA$320k - $400kfull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Staff Research Scientist focusing on foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning within Datadog AI Research, driving end-to-end research from framing questions to deployment, and collaborating with product and engineering to translate research into scalable capabilities.

Responsibilities

  • Drive research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability
  • 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, world modeling, scaling, and evaluation for models that learn the dynamics of complex distributed systems
  • Raise the technical bar across the team by reviewing research directions, mentoring researchers and research engineers, and setting standards for experimental rigor
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams across Research, Product, and Engineering to translate research advances into scalable Datadog capabilities
  • Contribute to research publications, present at top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML, and help open-source key model artifacts and benchmarks

Qualifications

  • 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, and 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

Skills

Required:Foundation modelsLarge-scale deep learning model trainingMultimodal learning
Nice to have:Research publishing

Benefits

  • Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.
  • Datadog offers a competitive salary and equity package, and may include variable compensation. Includes healthcare, dental, parental planning, mental health benefits, a 401(k) plan and match, paid time off, fitness reimbursements, and a discounted employee stock purchase plan.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

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