Research Science Intern (PhD)

Datadog•Pittsburgh, PA

4d•$110,000 - $140,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Datadog AI Research (DAIR) is partnering with Carnegie Mellon University to support a small number of PhD students working on open research problems grounded by ongoing efforts at Datadog/DAIR. You will frame a problem, run your own experiments, and write up what you find, with compute and data at a scale most academic labs cannot provide. You will collaborate with colleagues working on the same questions. DAIR is an industrial research lab motivated by practical challenges in observability and software operation: detecting and diagnosing failures, understanding complex production environments, and helping engineers operate software more effectively. The lab focuses on creating specialized foundation models, post-training and evaluating AI agents, and building frontier-scale machine learning systems. By combining fundamental research with Datadog's large-scale, real-world data and infrastructure, the lab develops new AI capabilities and translates them into practical systems with meaningful impact. Internship projects are shaped with your DAIR mentor and your CMU faculty advisor. You do not need prior experience with observability, monitoring, or infrastructure.

Requirements

Currently enrolled in a PhD program at Carnegie Mellon in machine learning, computer science, statistics, or a related field
Depth in at least one area relevant to the research above
Comfort running real experiments — training models, working with GPUs, reading and reimplementing recent papers
Evidence you can do research: conference or workshop papers, preprints, open-source contributions, or a lab project you can discuss in depth
Research taste. You can explain why a problem matters and what would change if it were solved.
Honest empiricism. You report the ablation that didn't work.
Support from your faculty advisor.

Nice To Haves

A long publication record. How you think matters more than how much you've published.
Observability, monitoring, or SRE background.
A perfect match to the areas above.

Responsibilities

Own a research project end to end: framing the question, running the experiments, writing it up
Work directly with a DAIR mentor engaged in the same problem, and stay connected to your advisor and lab
Publish, and use the work toward your dissertation
See research reach production, when it works