Description
The Behavior AI team builds the AI-based anomaly detection behind Datadog's security products. Our models learn what normal looks like across the billions of logs, events, and telemetry records flowing through the platform every second, and they flag the behavior that does not fit, on every record, in real time, at a cost that makes sense at our scale. What we build does not ship to a single feature. The same models power detection across many of Datadog's security products at once, so the work has impact well beyond any one team. Large general-purpose models are too slow and too expensive to run in that path, so we take the opposite approach: small, custom models, designed for high-throughput stream processing and optimized to run cheaply on every record.
We are hiring a Senior Applied Scientist to build these models from start to finish. You will contribute to designing the architecture, training at scale, and the optimization work that takes a model from training to running efficiently on production traffic. This optimization requires a deep understanding of the constraints imposed by both the software and the hardware, together with the applied mathematics to work within them: often it comes down to finding a mathematical reformulation that fits those constraints better, and that judgment can decide whether a model reaches production at all.
The work involves a number of open questions. How do you obtain most of the quality of a large model from one that is far smaller and cheap enough to run on the full stream? Where is it worth trading exactness for speed, and how do you reason about the error you accept? How do you make a small model's outputs clear enough that the detection engineers and analysts who rely on it can trust what it reports? If these are the problems you want to work on, we would like to hear from you.
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:
- Design and build custom mid-size models for high-throughput stream processing, and train them at scale.
- Optimize these models from start to finish, working across both the mathematics and the systems, often by finding mathematical reformulations that fit the hardware and software constraints better.
- Build the training data pipelines the work depends on when they do not already exist, from the raw stream to a training-ready dataset.
- Work with engineering to integrate models into production, with a clear focus on GPU utilization, latency, and cost per record on live traffic.
- Plan the roadmap of model and system improvements, based on a solid understanding of the product and of what matters most to users.
- Build an agentic layer on top of the models to analyze, validate, and act on their outputs.
- Build lightweight interpretability tools that make model behavior easier to explain to the people who rely on it.
- Maintain and monitor the models, services, and infrastructure your team owns, and take part in your team's on-call rotation.
Who You Are:
- You have a BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, or a related scientific field, or equivalent experience.
- You have hands-on experience training and fine-tuning models at scale, and deploying them into production systems with real throughput and cost constraints.
- You have a working knowledge of how GPUs work, and a track record of making models run efficiently within real hardware constraints.
- You have strong applied-mathematics fundamentals and reach for them naturally when designing and optimizing models.
- You have a real passion for applied mathematics, software design, and implementation. This role sits at the intersection of the three, and it is a requirement for the position.
- You care about code simplicity and performance, and you can build the data pipelines and the surrounding production code, in addition to the models themselves.
- You can explain complex ideas and trade-offs clearly to engineers and product partners, and you let a solid understanding of the product guide what you build next.
- Bonus: experience with efficient sequence architectures, model interpretability, or large-scale streaming systems.
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:
- New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP)
- Continuous professional development, product training, and career pathing
- Opportunity to attend and present at conferences and meetups, and to publish your work
- Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking
- An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)
- Competitive global benefits
Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.
About Datadog, Equal Opportunity, and Privacy and AI Guidelines boilerplate is appended automatically by the applicant tracking system. Add Datadog's current standard blocks before publishing.
#LI-Hybrid
About Datadog:
Datadog is the leading observability and security platform for the AI era, providing businesses with unified visibility across the technology stack to manage complexity at scale. It brings applications, infrastructure, data, models, and security into one place, using AI to detect and resolve issues before they impact customers. Trusted globally by Fortune 500 companies and high-growth AI leaders, Datadog enables businesses to move faster with clarity and confidence. Learn more about #DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.
Equal Opportunity at Datadog:
Datadog is proud to offer equal employment opportunity to everyone regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, veteran status, and other characteristics protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.
Datadog endeavors to make our Careers Page accessible to all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please complete this form. This form is for accommodation requests only and cannot be used to inquire about the status of applications.
Privacy and AI Guidelines:
Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice. For information on our AI policy, please visit Interviewing at Datadog AI Guidelines.
Similar jobs
Est. 80,000 EUR
As a Research Engineer on our team, you will partner with Research Scientists to turn research ideas into working systems, building the data, tooling, and infrastructure that enable rapid iteration, trustworthy evaluatio…
Est. 216,000 USD
Applied AI is where Datadog's ambitious AI bets get built and shipped (Bits Chat, updog). We sit at the intersection of research and product: turning promising capabilities from Datadog AI Research lab and the research c…
Est. 360,000 USD
As a Research Scientist on our team, you will partner with Research Engineers, working on fundamental research problems and collaborating with Datadog's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into p…
Est. 80,000 EUR
As a Research Scientist on our team, you will partner with Research Engineers, working on fundamental research problems and collaborating with Datadog's product and engineering teams to translate research advances into p…
Est. 216,000 USD
About Datadog: We're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—providing…
Est. 274,500 USD
About Datadog: We're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—providing…
Est. 216,000 USD
You will lead a small, hands-on engineering team building the secure, scalable Core Analytics Data Access Platform that accelerates Datadog’s Applied AI and analytics capabilities. The team owns the Data Access Platform…
Est. 216,000 USD
Distributed Systems engineers at Datadog design, implement and run in production the foundational platforms powering our applications. Your data pipelines will ingest, store, analyze and query in real-time billions of ev…
Est. 310,500 USD
The Dashboards product is Datadog's unified single-pane-of-glass for metrics, logs, and traces—a comprehensive treasure trove of observability data. We are transforming Dashboards into an AI-native control surface and th…
Est. 310,500 USD
Team description At Datadog, AI agents are becoming first-class consumers of observability, security, and software delivery data — from third-party coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot, to our own Bits SRE…
Est. 85,000 EUR
We are building the best platform in the world for engineers to understand, scale, and protect their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale—trillions of data points per day—providing always-on alertin…
Est. 80,000 EUR
The Applied AI team designs and builds algorithmically driven features in the Datadog app. We work across a range of applications, primarily focusing on analysis on streaming data such as anomaly detection, error outlier…
Est. 385,000 USD
Datadog is expanding the Technical Solutions (TS) organization by seeking a customer-focused, deeply technical Distinguished Architect to join our Product Solutions Architecture (PSA) team. In this role, you will act as…
Est. 120,000 EUR
Datadog’s Product Analytics suite spans Product Analytics, Session Replay, Feature Flags, and Experimentation. Together they give product teams a complete, quantitative and qualitative picture of how users experience the…
Est. 315,000 USD
Datadog is seeking a Director of Product Management to lead our AI Observability portfolio and shape how organizations build, monitor, and scale AI systems in production. This role leads LLM Observability and helps defin…
Est. 306,000 USD
We’re looking for a Senior Staff Software Engineer with deep experience in GenAI/ML to join Datadog’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) team. APM is a product which provides deep visibility into applications, enab…
Est. 120,000 EUR
The AI platform is responsible for all AI infrastructure across Datadog. Our mission is to provide tools and platforms that enable data scientists and engineers to conduct large-scale training and inference with ease. We…
Est. 189,000 USD
This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to actively shape how Engineering, one of the most important parts of how Datadog develops its people. You'll sit at the center of Datadog's biggest tale…
Est. 100,500 USD
Datadog’s Technical Solutions organization includes 1,200+ sales engineers, support engineers, post-sales experts, and solution architects. They run on an ecosystem of enterprise platforms and internal tools that directl…
Est. 189,000 USD
This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who wants to actively shape how Engineering, one of the most important parts of how Datadog develops its people. You'll sit at the center of Datadog's biggest tale…
Est. 120,000 EUR
Source Code Integration enables Product teams at Datadog to develop features that leverage our customers’ source code. This brings the platform closer to developers, as it helps them relate their telemetry to code to run…
Est. 234,000 USD
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer with deep experience in GenAI/ML to join Datadog’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) team. APM is a product which provides deep visibility into applications, enabling us…
Est. 274,500 USD
As a Staff Application Security Engineer at Datadog, you'll set technical direction for how we approach application security at scale. You'll define the frameworks, methodologies, and architectural patterns that engineer…
Est. 175,500 USD
At Datadog, we're on a mission to build the best platform in the world for engineers to understand and scale their systems, applications, and teams. We operate at high scale, enabling seamless collaboration and problem-s…
Est. 120,000 EUR
Applied AI is where Datadog's ambitious AI bets get built and shipped (Bits Chat, updog). We sit at the intersection of research and product: turning promising capabilities from Datadog AI Research lab and the research c…
Est. 80,000 EUR
As organizations rapidly adopt AI applications and agentic systems, security teams need visibility and control over how these technologies are being used. Datadog's AI & Data Security product helps customers discover…
Est. 147,500 USD
The product operations team enables product excellence at scale at Datadog. With over thirty standalone products on a single platform, product operations drives consistency, efficiency, and quality across the organizatio…
Est. 193,500 USD
We are a team of engineers that translate our real-world experience to help our user communities solve problems. With a focus on AI-accelerated workflows and next-generation developer ecosystems, you will have the opport…
Est. 261,000 USD
Datadog is entering a new chapter in how our product looks, feels and operates. We’re building a small, high-leverage Design Lab team to define that evolution, and we’re looking for a Staff Visual Designer to help author…
Est. 175,500 USD
As organizations rapidly adopt AI applications and agentic systems, security teams need visibility and control over how these technologies are being used. Datadog's AI & Data Security product helps customers discover…