Staff Research Scientist - Post-Training for Agents

Datadog • Pittsburgh, PA

2d • $320,000 - $400,000

About The Position

As a Staff Research Scientist within Datadog AI Research (DAIR), you will drive research in post-training and autonomous agents as a hands-on individual contributor. You will advance reinforcement learning, simulated environments, synthetic data generation, and evaluation methods for agents operating across complex real-world systems. You will set the technical direction for ambitious research programs, raise the technical bar for the researchers and research engineers around you, and collaborate with Datadog's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into products.

Requirements

• 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
• Have driven technically ambitious research at meaningful scale as an individual contributor, whether in an industry research lab, startup, academic environment, or another research setting
• Have extensive hands-on experience designing and implementing reinforcement learning systems, agent training methods, simulated environments, synthetic data pipelines, or evaluation frameworks
• Have a track record of research impact through influential publications, significant model or system contributions, widely used research artifacts, or equivalent technical achievements
• Set technical direction through influence rather than authority, and have mentored other researchers or engineers and elevated the quality of work around you
• Want to stay deeply hands-on in research for the long term, and can communicate complex research findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences

Responsibilities

• Drive research in agent post-training and reinforcement learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability and security
• Own research problems end to end, from framing the question through experimentation, model development, and evaluation
• 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
• Raise the technical bar across the team by reviewing research directions, mentoring researchers and research engineers, and setting standards for experimental rigor
• 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

Benefits

• competitive salary and equity package
• variable compensation
• healthcare
• dental
• parental planning
• mental health benefits
• a 401(k) plan and match
• paid time off
• fitness reimbursements
• a discounted employee stock purchase plan

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree