AI Research Engineer - Datadog AI Research (DAIR)

Rozgoo; New York (NY); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Datadog is seeking a Research Engineer to partner with researchers and turn ideas into scalable, production-ready systems. You will help build data pipelines, training and evaluation infrastructure, and tooling to support rapid experimentation.

You will work on world models for observability and autonomous agents, contribute to benchmarks, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to harden prototypes into reliable services.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in distributed computing and ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate multimodal data pipelines, training and evaluation infrastructure.

Skills

Distributed computing

RL Infra

ML systems

Python

Rust

C++

Go

PyTorch

JAX

containerization

orchestration

GPU acceleration

Megatron-LM

DeepSpeed

SkyRL

VeRL

TorchTitan

SFT

RLVR

RLHF

Tools

Ray

Slurm

Megatron-LM

DeepSpeed

SkyRL

VeRL

TorchTitan

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

As a Research Engineer on our team, you will partner with Research Scientists to turn research ideas into working systems, building the data, tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid iteration, trustworthy evaluation, and a smooth path from prototype to production.

Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., Bits AI, Bits Evolve, and our time series foundation model), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security.

We are focused on two research areas:

1. World Models for Observability -- 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.
2. Trained Agents for Observability-- 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.

What You'll Do:

• Build and operate multimodal data pipelines, training and evaluation infrastructure, benchmarks, and internal tooling
• Implement models, run experiments at scale, and profile for reliability, performance, and cost
• Build simulation environments and replay infrastructure for agent training and evaluation
• Orchestrate distributed training and distributed RL with Ray, including scheduling, scaling, and failure recovery
• Establish rigorous automated benchmarks and regression tests for world model predictions, agent performance, and simulation fidelity
• Collaborate with Research Scientists, Product, and Engineering to integrate capabilities into Datadog's products and to harden prototypes into reliable services
• Contribute to research publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), and produce high-quality code, documentation, and open-source artifacts

Who You Are:

• You have depth in distributed computing, RL Infra, and ML systems for training and inference at scale; experience with Ray, Slurm, or similar frameworks is a plus
• You are proficient in Python, familiar with a systems language (e.g., Rust, C++, or Go), and comfortable with modern cloud and data infrastructure
• You have practical experience implementing and operating ML training and inference systems (e.g., PyTorch or JAX), including containerization, orchestration, and GPU acceleration
• You have practical experience with large-scale model training and fine-tuning, including frameworks like Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, SkyRL, VeRL, or TorchTitan, and techniques such as SFT, RLVR, RLHF, and efficient inference (quantization, specul