Staff Research Scientist - Post-Training for Agents

Job summary

Responsibilities

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…

• 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

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…
• You have driven technically ambitious research at meaningful scale as an individual contributor, whether in an industry research lab, startup, academic environment, or another…
• You have extensive hands-on experience designing and implementing reinforcement learning systems, agent training methods, simulated environments, synthetic data pipelines, or…
• You have a track record of research impact through influential publications, significant model or system contributions, widely used research artifacts, or equivalent technical…
• 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