About the Job
As a Research Manager within Datadog AI Research (DAIR), you will lead a team working on fundamental research in post-training and autonomous agents while remaining deeply engaged in the technical direction of the work. You will advance reinforcement learning, simulated environments, synthetic data generation, and e...
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 agent post-training and reinforcement 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
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
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
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 reinforcement learning, AI agents, post-training, 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 or implementing reinforcement learning systems, agent training methods, simulated environments, synthetic data pipelines, or evaluation frameworks
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 know 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 experience, we encourage you to apply.
