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Staff Research Scientist - Post-Training for Agents

Datadog
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Hybrid (New York, NY / Pittsburgh, PA)$320k - $400kfull-timePosted 1w ago

About the role

Staff Research Scientist in Datadog AI Research (DAIR) focusing on post-training and autonomous agents, reinforcement learning, simulated environments, synthetic data generation, and evaluation methods for agents in complex real-world systems.

Responsibilities

  • Drive research in agent post-training and reinforcement learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability and security
  • Own research problems end to end, from framing the question through experimentation, model development, and evaluation
  • Design and advance reinforcement learning approaches, post-training methods, and training loops for agents operating in complex environments
  • Build simulated environments, synthetic data generation approaches, and evaluation frameworks that enable scalable agent training and rigorous measurement
  • 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 advances in autonomous agents 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

  • PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent experience, with deep expertise in reinforcement learning, AI agents, post-training, or generative modeling
  • Extensive hands-on experience designing and implementing reinforcement learning systems, agent training methods, simulated environments, synthetic data pipelines, or evaluation frameworks
  • Track record of research impact through influential publications, significant model or system contributions, widely used research artifacts, or equivalent technical achievements
  • Experience mentoring researchers or engineers and elevating quality of work; able to set technical direction through influence
  • Desire to stay hands-on in research long term and communicate complex findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences

Skills

Required:Reinforcement learningPost-training methodsSimulated environmentsSynthetic data generation
Nice to have:Research publication

Benefits

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

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