AI Research Manager — RL & Autonomous Agents

Datadog, Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 244,000 - 305,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity package (RSUs)

Employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)

Healthcare coverage

Hybrid work environment

Job summary

Datadog seeks an exceptional Research Manager for the DAIR group to lead fundamental research in post‑training and autonomous agents. You will guide reinforcement learning, simulated environments, synthetic data generation, and evaluation methods for agents across complex real‑world systems.

You will provide technical leadership, mentor talented researchers, shape research direction, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate advances into scalable Datadog capabilities.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, ML, or related field or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically ambitious research at meaningful scale.
• Extensive hands‑on experience with RL systems, agent training, or evaluation frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Lead research in post‑training and reinforcement learning for autonomous agents.
• Mentor researchers and researchers engineers; shape research direction and strategy.
• Design and advance RL approaches, training loops, and simulation environments.
• Build synthetic data pipelines and evaluation frameworks for scalable agent training.
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering to translate research into Datadog capabilities.
• Contribute to publications and present at top conferences; open‑source key artifacts.

Skills

Reinforcement learning

AI agents

Leadership

Mentoring

Hands-on research

Publications

Research strategy

Experimentation

Education

PhD in Computer Science or Machine Learning

Job description

Datadog seeks an exceptional Research Manager for the DAIR group to lead fundamental research in post‑training and autonomous agents. You will guide reinforcement learning, simulated environments, synthetic data generation, and evaluation methods for agents across complex real‑world systems.

You will provide technical leadership, mentor talented researchers, shape research direction, and collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate advances into scalable Datadog capabilities.