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 bring
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Role overview
Job description
AI Platform builds the foundations of Datadog's AI efforts. The org is 70+ people organised in three pillars: training and serving (GPU clusters, distributed training, low-level infrastructure), agents (agent harnesses, memory systems, the internal AI gateway that routes every LLM request at Datadog), and evaluation and experimentation. This role sits in the evaluation and experimentation pillar, which owns Datadog's shared annotation and evaluation infrastructure — including the evaluation scenario store and the telemetry archival systems used across the Bits org. Together they let an agent travel back in time and query what Datadog looked like at the exact moment an incident happened, so scenarios can be replayed and agent performance tracked over time. Specifically, you'll be the first applied scientist on GenSim (Generative Simulations), the team that builds the environments Datadog'
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Qualification
The org is 70+ people organised in three pillars: training and serving (GPU clusters, distributed training, low-level infrastructure), agents (agent harnesses, memory systems, the internal AI gateway that routes every LLM request at Datadog), and evaluation and experimentation; Determine how this data is best applied, in LLM post-training and in evaluation, and own the agent and LLM application evaluation approaches for these environments; Who You Are: You have a PhD, MS or equivalent research experience in a scientific field, with strong applied mathematics grounding; You have hands-on experience with LLM and agent post-training data: how it is created, managed, and how training-data quality is controlled
Department · Dev Eng
Hiring company
Datadog
We tackle some of the hardest technical problems while delivering a product that "just works" for our customers. And we are backed by some of the best VCs in NYC and the world. Do you want to make a difference? Are you exceptional at your job, and intrinsically motivated by it? Do you eat hard problems for breakfast and find them beautifully simple solutions by lunchtime? Do you ever wish you were there in the early days of these startups everyone is talking about? If so, we want to hear from you.
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