Staff Research Scientist, Foundation & World Models

Datadog

Confirmed live today High trust

Quick summary

Work type: On-site
Location: New York, NYPittsburgh, PA
Salary: $320,000–$400,000 / yr
Posted: 3 days ago
Freshness: Confirmed live today
Nearby: 99+ roles within 25 mi

Market check

Salary context

Above market

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $226k

This role $360k

$148k $427k

below market most similar roles pay here above market

This role pays more than 98% of similar roles. Most pay $196,451–$254,750 — the blue band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $360k versus about $226k for comparable roles.

Based on 240 similar postings.

Employer

About Datadog

Datadog, Inc. is an American company that provides an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform.

Datadog currently has 60 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $192,000–$240,000 across 59 roles with salary data.

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View all roles at Datadog

At a glance

TL;DR · Staff Research Scientist, Foundation & World Models

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As a Staff Research Scientist within Datadog AI Research, you will serve as a hands-on individual contributor driving research in foundation models and world models. You will own research problems end to end, from framing questions through experimentation, model development, and evaluation. Your daily work involves training large-scale multimodal models on diverse telemetry data, including metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events. You will advance approaches to pre-training, representation learning, scaling, and evaluation for models that learn the dynamics of complex distributed systems. You must possess deep expertise in generative modeling, multimodal learning, and large-scale deep learning models like large language models. You will collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate research into scalable capabilities while contributing to publications and open-source artifacts.

What does a Research Scientist earn?

Median $216250 from 42 postings across 16 companies.

See salary data

Skills

Foundation Models World Models Multimodal Learning Deep Learning Large Language Models Generative Modeling Representation Learning Pre-training Distributed Systems Observability Metrics Logs Traces Topology Events Telemetry Data

What you'll do

Drive research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning grounded in observability.
Own research problems end-to-end from framing questions through experimentation, model development, and evaluation.
Train large-scale multimodal models on telemetry data including metrics, logs, traces, and topology.
Advance pre-training, representation learning, and scaling for models learning complex distributed system dynamics.
Review research directions and mentor researchers to set standards for experimental rigor.
Translate research advances into scalable Datadog products by collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Contribute to research publications and present findings at top-tier conferences like NeurIPS and ICML.
Open-source key model artifacts and benchmarks to the broader research community.

What we're looking for

Hold a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or have equivalent experience.
Possess deep expertise in foundation models, world models, multimodal learning, or generative modeling.
Have experience driving technically ambitious research at meaningful scale as an individual contributor.
Have extensive hands-on experience designing, training, and evaluating large-scale deep learning models.
Have experience in multimodal or non-text data (preferred).
Have a track record of research impact through influential publications, significant model contributions, or equivalent technical achievements.
Have experience mentoring other researchers or engineers and setting technical standards.
Ability to communicate complex research findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences.

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