About the Job
As a Research Manager within Datadog AI Research (DAIR), you will lead a team working on fundamental research in foundation models and world models while remaining deeply engaged in the technical direction of the work. You will advance large-scale pre-training and multimodal learning across the diverse signals gener...
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.
Key Responsibilities
Lead research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning, setting the technical direction for ambitious research programs grounded in observability and security
Guide and mentor researchers and research engineers while remaining closely involved in research strategy, experimentation, model development, and technical problem-solving
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
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
Required Skills & Abilities
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 demonstrated the ability to lead technically ambitious research at meaningful scale, 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 have operated at a senior technical level and have experience leading, mentoring, and developing teams of researchers or engineers, while remaining deeply hands-on in technical direction and execution
You want to develop and support a research team while maintaining a strong technical identity, and you can communicate complex research findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences
Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand 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 skills, we encourage you to apply.
