Research Manager - Foundation & World Models

Job description

As a Research Manager within Datadog AI Research (DAIR), you will lead a team working on fundamental research in foundation models and world models while remaining deeply engaged in the technical direction of the work. 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 provide technical leadership to a team of researchers and research engineers, mentor and develop highly technical talent, shape research direction, and collaborate with Datadog’s product and engineering teams to translate research advances into products. This role is designed for an exceptional researcher or technical leader who wants to maintain a strong hands-on research identity while developing and leading a high-performing team. At Datadog, we place value in our office culture - the relationships and collaboration it builds and the creativity it brings to the table. We operate as a hybrid workplace to ensure our Datadogs can create a work-life harmony that best fits them. What You'll Do: Lead research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal 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 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 Collaborate with cross-functional teams across Research, Product, and Engineering to translate research advances 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 Who You Are: You hold a PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or have equivalent experience, with deep expertise in areas such as foundation models, world models, multimodal learning, 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, training, or evaluating large-scale deep learning models (such as large language models), with experience in multimodal or non-text data considered a strong plus 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 have operated at a senior technical level and have experience leading, mentoring, and developing teams of researchers or engineers, while remaining deeply hands-on in technical direction and execution You want to develop and support a research team while maintaining a strong technical identity, and you can communicate complex research findings effectively across technical and non-technical audiences Datadog values people from all walks of life. We understand not everyone will meet all the above qualifications on day one. That's okay. If you’re passionate about technology and want to grow your skills, we encourage you to apply. Benefits and Growth: High income earning opportunities based on individual performance New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing Sales training in