About the role
As a Staff Research Scientist within Datadog AI Research (DAIR), you will drive research in foundation models and world models as a hands-on individual contributor. You will advance large-scale pre-training and multimodal learning across the diverse signals generated by distributed systems, including metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events. 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. What You'll Do: Drive research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability Own research problems end to end, from framing the question through experimentation, model development, and evaluation 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 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 research advances into sca…