As a Staff Research Scientist within the company 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 the company's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into products.
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 the company 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
Requirements
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 driven technically ambitious research at meaningful scale as an individual contributor, whether in an industry research lab, startup, academic environment, or another research setting
You have extensive hands-on experience designing and 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 set technical direction through influence rather than authority, and you have mentored other researchers or engineers and elevated the quality of work around you
You want to stay deeply hands-on in research for the long term, and you can communicate complex research findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences
Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with the company.
About the company:
The company (NASDAQ: DDOG) is a global SaaS business, delivering a rare combination of growth and profitability. We are on a mission to break down silos and solve complexity in the cloud age by enabling digital transformation, cloud migration, and infrastructure monitoring of our customers’ entire technology stacks. Together, we champion professional development, diversity of thought, innovation, and work excellence to empower continuous growth. Join the pack and become part of a collaborative, pragmatic, and thoughtful people-first community where we solve tough problems, take smart risks, and celebrate one another. Learn more about DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and the company Learning Center.