The opportunity
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…
What you'll do
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
What they're looking for
- 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
