Jobs in United States

Staff Research Scientist in United States

1,760 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current staff research scientist jobs across United States. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

M
📍 United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -100%

$170K – $250K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

At Playlist, life's richest moments happen when people step away from screens to move, connect, explore, and play. We're building the definitive platform for intentional living, connecting people with inspiring experiences in fitness, wellness, and beyond. With popular brands like Mindbody and ClassPass, Playlist empowers businesses and individuals, making it effortless for aspirations to become actions. Join us in reshaping technology's role to foster meaningful, real-world connections. Mindbody equips wellness entrepreneurs with technology to support thriving businesses and create exceptional experiences. Innovation and curiosity drive our culture, connecting businesses and individuals through cutting-edge solutions. Join us if you're passionate about enhancing wellness through technology. The Role You'll Play At Mindbody, Core Engineering builds and evolves the foundational systems that help our products run reliably at scale. In this staff role, you’ll bring clarity to complex technical problems, guide architecture, and strengthen how we design, deliver, and operate the backend services that power real-world experiences. Lead cross-team technical execution, aligning architecture and delivery across multiple squads and core domains Design and evolve microservices patterns that improve reliability, performance, and maintainability Drive cloud and deployment improvements across AWS, Mindbody’s cloud platform, and our containerized deployment environment Partner with engineering and product leaders to turn ambiguous problems into clear technical plans and milestones Establish and socialize standards for service design, APIs, and relational data modeling (SQL) Strengthen monitoring and operational visibility using New Relic and Kibana, turning insights into durable system improvements Mentor and unblock engineers through design reviews, pairing, and practical guidance Reduce technical risk and complexity while balancing

PythonReactSQLAWS
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $200K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

We are looking for a talented engineer to lead evaluation of startup acquisition opportunities in the AI, cloud and security space. You will drive product evaluations, prepare and manage technical architecture discussions with target groups in Product and Engineering and provide roadmap suggestions for M&A and investments for Datadog. You will be a key partner to Datadog’s C-level leadership and highly visible at the most senior levels of Datadog. The role is reporting into the Senior Director of Product Strategy and falls within the Product organization. We are looking for an innovative and strategic thinker who is passionate about the latest tech being developed by startups in the cloud, AI and security space. The ideal candidate enjoys researching and evaluating new technologies, works effectively with cross-functional teams, and communicates opinions concisely to our leadership team. Broad understanding of relevant Cloud Technologies and deep understanding of the full coverage of Datadogs current offerings is necessary. The Corporate Development team is small and values authentic, strong-willed individuals who think creatively and proactively. This role leads technical due diligence from a product and architecture perspective across our acquisition pipeline. You'll scope and stand up proof-of-concept and sandbox environments to stress-test candidate products, then give an honest, unvarnished view of their quality and depth - the kind of assessment that holds up regardless of deal momentum. You'll assess technical architecture, flag the risks and open questions that matter most early, and turn that into a clear post-acquisition integration path. Working closely with engineering, you'll keep the evaluation focused on what's actually decision-relevant, then translate the findings into strategic recommendations for leadership and help carry the integration through by partnering with the right people on the other side. What You’l

D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $244K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 always-on alerting, metrics visualization, logs, and application tracing for tens of thousands of companies. Our engineering culture values pragmatism, honesty, and simplicity to solve hard problems the right way. The Opportunity: Datadog’s Staff Engineers are our technical leaders operating at the forefront of technology, building solutions that take us through at least our next five years of growth. They do this in three major ways: As individual contributors, they bring world class technical abilities to deliver industry leading systems in areas such as data visualization, virtual runtime profiling, and planet scale streaming. As technical leaders they bring experienced technical breadth and communication skills to tackling design and architectural problems spanning the organization, charting the right course, then leading delivery. In both roles they participate in the staff engineering community and help us learn from what the industry is doing and what we've built before, and so improve company wide standards around software and systems engineering. Some examples of projects a staff engineer may own include designing and building a new data storage engine handling hundreds of millions of records per second, being the lead engineer building a new product like synthetics or profiling, or rebuilding a critical service to handle the next two orders of magnitude of scale. What You'll Do: Be the technical owner of multiple pieces of critical architecture in your area of the business Own delivery of the systems you architect from beginning-to-end, doing what it takes to get things shipped and at full scale in production Dive deep into performance of systems; inventing new approaches that bring efficiency at scale Who You Are: You have a BS/MS/P

AIGoRustSpring
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $234K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 users to identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize services. With distributed tracing, profiling, out-of-the-box dashboards, and seamless correlation with other telemetry data, Datadog APM provides some of the deepest and most structured visibility into the health and performance of applications. This context sets us up for an opportunity to be the world leaders in agentic investigations and incident troubleshooting. You’ll act as a technical leader within the APM group, focused on agentic workflows. You’ll lead efforts to design, train, evaluate, and deploy GenAI/ML models at scale. We’re looking for a product-minded ML engineer with strong technical expertise, excellent communication skills, and a track record of driving impactful initiatives end to end. 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: Act as a technical leader within the APM organization, driving GenAI/machine learning projects from concept to production. Build and benchmark GenAI/ML models using state-of-the-art techniques. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to build automated investigation and triaging tools. Influence product direction by bringing a strong product mindset to your work, always advocating for the end user. Guide teams through ambiguity, scaling challenges, and evolving requirements with clear technical direction. Actively mentor engineers and influence engineering culture through leadership in design reviews, technical talks, and working groups. Who You Are: You have a BS/MS/PhD in a scientific field or equiva

Machine LearningAIGoRust
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $232K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 it. Our design system powers everything we ship. Now we’re ready to evolve it. As Datadog expands into AI-driven experiences and more complex product surfaces, the visual language needs to grow with it. We’re looking for someone who can help define that next phase, someone with taste, judgment, and the confidence to shape how the product feels at scale. 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 Define and evolve Datadog’s visual language across product surfaces. Establish the visual quality bar for the platform. Lead exploratory and concept work that pushes our system forward. Translate bold visual ideas into scalable patterns that can live inside a design system. Partner deeply with Brand, Product Design, and Design Systems to unify expression across product and marketing. Influence executive stakeholders through clear, compelling visual storytelling. Prototype, test, and refine new patterns before they become systemized. Help shape how visual direction is integrated into our design process. You will report directly to the Design Director and work as part of a small, focused team defining the future state before it scales across hundreds of designers and engineers. Who You Are You have 10+ years of experience in visual and/or product design You have led a meaningful visual evolution or rebrand within a mature product ecosystem. You have strong taste and are comfortable defending a point of view. You know how to translate brand into scalable product systems. You think in systems, but you’re motivated by craft. Yo

D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $276K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 the central hub where every team moves seamlessly from question to insight to action – providing a guided experience that feels like having an expert SRE at your side and ensuring the entry point is never an empty canvas. We're hiring a Staff Applied Scientist to define and guarantee the quality of this AI system at scale. "Good" isn't one number — it spans answer quality, tool-selection accuracy (critical given the growing catalog of data sources and visualizations), retrieval relevance, latency, token cost, and end-to-end agent success. The space is full of open questions. How do you evaluate an agent end-to-end when the trajectory is non-deterministic? How do you score tool selection when a user’s query can result in the agent making decisions against dozens of visualizations and data sources – both of which are growing month over month? How do you build a measurement system that catches regressions across all widget types and data sources (e.g., enforcing correct grouping, sorting, and time overrides), and is easy to use and extend by dozens of teams? If those are the problems you want to spend your time on, come build this with us. 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: Own the evaluation strategy for Dashboards, as well as sister teams within our organization. Define the metrics — offline and online, quality and cost, single-turn and multi-turn — that the team and the broader organization optimize against. Build the eval datasets, golden traces, and regression harnesses that catch quality changes before they hit customers, an

AIGoRustSpring
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $204K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

The opportunity Datadog’s Infrastructure products help engineers understand and operate the systems their applications depend on. Our customers work in complex environments like Kubernetes and serverless, where infrastructure changes constantly, information is dense, and decisions about reliability, performance, and cost are closely connected. We’re looking for a Staff Product Designer to join Modern Compute, with an initial focus on Containers Autoscaling. Autoscaling helps engineering teams make better decisions about how their applications and infrastructure use resources. Designing these experiences requires making deeply technical systems understandable, helping customers act with confidence, and fitting into the tools and workflows they already use. The team is rethinking how workload and cluster autoscaling come together as a more coherent product experience. This includes how customers get started, understand recommendations, evaluate value, and safely apply changes across their environments. The work also connects to other parts of Datadog, including observability, Cloud Cost Management, permissions, and AI-assisted workflows. As a Staff Product Designer, you will help define that direction and lead the work from early problem framing through shipped product. You will partner closely with product and engineering, bring a high level of interaction and visual craft to complex workflows, and help raise the quality of design across Modern Compute. 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 help our Datadogs find a work-life rhythm that works for them. What you’ll do Lead end-to-end product design for Modern Compute, initially focused on our Autoscaling product. Help define the product direction for an area that is still evolving, from early framing and exploration through detailed design and delivery. Design clear, trustwort

KubernetesGitAIGo
D
📍 Massachusetts, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $234K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

The ML Observability team builds cutting-edge tools to monitor, explain, and improve AI systems in production, particularly those leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI. We provide robust, scalable observability for AI workloads, including drift detection and model evaluation, and behavior tracing, enabling customers to ship AI with confidence. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll lead the development of new features and foundational capabilities within Datadog’s LLM Observability product. You will shape product direction, drive experimentation, and apply your deep understanding of both AI systems and software engineering to solve open-ended problems in the fast-moving AI landscape. Your work will directly impact how our customers monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize LLM-based applications in production. Join us in building the foundational tools that make AI systems observable, understandable, and reliable in the real world. 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: Drive design and implementation of LLM observability features. Ideate, prototype, and scale new product features to provide insights and drive improvements for generative AI systems Work cross-functionally with other eng teams, product, UX, and applied science to iterate fast and find product-market fit Develop and extend tools for tracing, evaluating, and debugging LLMs Influence architecture decisions and mentor engineers to build resilient, high-performance systems Stay close to customer pain points and use those insights to guide product and engineering priorities Stay current with industry trends and advancements in machine learning and observability, driving innovation within the team Who You Are: You have a BS/MS/PhD in a Computer Science, Engineering or r

Machine LearningAIGoRust
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $244K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Role Summary: Datadog is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help shape the future of our Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) Logs offering by unifying observability pipelines with log management software that customers deploy and manage in their own infrastructure. This role will focus on building and scaling systems that process, route, and store high-volume observability data within customer-managed infrastructure. You will operate as a hands-on technical leader, driving architecture, cross-team delivery, and product direction across a complex and evolving space. This is a high-impact opportunity to influence product strategy, mentor engineers, and solve deeply technical challenges at scale. 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: Make customer-controlled deployments feel like a managed Datadog product: deployment, upgrades, configuration, observability, diagnostics, reliability, and secure operation across diverse customer cloud environments Build and scale high-throughput systems for log processing, routing, and transformation across distributed environments Lead cross-team initiatives, aligning engineers, product managers, and stakeholders to deliver complex, multi-team projects Design and implement software that runs reliably that customers deploy and operate within their own cloud infrastructure. Improve system performance, scalability, and cost efficiency through thoughtful trade-off analysis and capacity planning Contribute hands-on to critical code paths, debugging, and deployment challenges in customer environments Who You Are: You have significant experience building software that is installed, deployed, and operated in customer environments rather than only as a fully managed SaaS service. You have strong expertise in distributed systems,

AWSAzureGCPKubernetes
D
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $200K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

We are looking for a talented engineer to lead evaluation of startup acquisition opportunities in the AI, cloud and security space. You will drive product evaluations, prepare and manage technical architecture discussions with target groups in Product and Engineering and provide roadmap suggestions for M&A and investments for Datadog. You will be a key partner to Datadog’s C-level leadership and highly visible at the most senior levels of Datadog. The role is reporting into the Senior Director of Product Strategy and falls within the Product organization. We are looking for an innovative and strategic thinker who is passionate about the latest tech being developed by startups in the cloud, AI and security space. The ideal candidate enjoys researching and evaluating new technologies, works effectively with cross-functional teams, and communicates opinions concisely to our leadership team. Broad understanding of relevant Cloud Technologies and deep understanding of the full coverage of Datadogs current offerings is necessary. The Corporate Development team is small and values authentic, strong-willed individuals who think creatively and proactively. This role leads technical due diligence from a product and architecture perspective across our acquisition pipeline. You'll scope and stand up proof-of-concept and sandbox environments to stress-test candidate products, then give an honest, unvarnished view of their quality and depth - the kind of assessment that holds up regardless of deal momentum. You'll assess technical architecture, flag the risks and open questions that matter most early, and turn that into a clear post-acquisition integration path. Working closely with engineering, you'll keep the evaluation focused on what's actually decision-relevant, then translate the findings into strategic recommendations for leadership and help carry the integration through by partnering with the right people on the other side. What You’l

D
📍 Massachusetts, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $244K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Datadog’s Cloud Networks team designs, builds, and maintains the production network infrastructure that powers everything built on top of our platform across AWS, GCP, Azure, and beyond. In this role, you’ll set technical direction for how we scale our multi-region, multi-cloud network footprint while keeping reliability and performance high. You’ll partner closely with internal teams and Cloud Service Providers to troubleshoot complex connectivity issues, integrate new networking capabilities, and improve the foundations our engineers and customers rely on. This is a high-impact opportunity to drive meaningful improvements in scale, resiliency, and cost efficiency. 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, build, and operate cloud network infrastructure across AWS, GCP, Azure, and Neoclouds in a multi-region environment. Own connectivity between clouds, customers, and developers—ensuring scalable, secure, and reliable network paths. Set clear technical direction for expanding data centers and evolving the network while maintaining stability and performance. Improve cross-site and cross-region connectivity patterns to support Datadog’s growing platform needs. Lead deep investigations into latency, packet loss, and connectivity failures – from pcap and path analysis through to escalations with cloud providers that may originate from customer support Identify and deliver network-related efficiency and cost-saving opportunities that positively impact business health. Who You Are: You have deep networking expertise. You understand BGP, route policies, path selection, prefix advertisement, and what breaks in large-scale networking. You have substantial experience designing, building, and evolving large-scale Software-Defined Networks—inclu

AWSAzureGCPAI
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

As a Staff Product Manager on Datadog's Observability Data Platform (ODP) , you will lead product management for a portfolio of foundational platform bets — work that changes the cost structure and capability of the platform itself, not the cost of any single feature. Among ODP’s portfolio of engineering work are efforts to bring the platform's unit cost down meaningfully each quarter, plus a slate of architectural bets aimed at order-of-magnitude cost reduction over the longer horizon. The work you'll lead reshapes how Datadog ingests, routes, and exposes telemetry value to customers — and is foundational to how every product team in Datadog's ecosystem will think about telemetry economics going forward. This role reports to the Group Product Manager of ODP. What You'll Do: Set product direction across foundational platform bets by defining problems and desired outcomes, partnering with engineering to determine slices of work that drive value in phases for users and the business. Collaborate on the long-term cost-and-value architecture of the platform — how value-aware telemetry, innovative data engines, and customer-facing cost stories fit together over multiple quarters. Develop and defend sizing and impact estimates for large, diffuse programs — credibly produce the analysis that engineering leadership and pricing partners need to make resourcing and prioritization calls. Anticipate and communicate market trends in telemetry economics and agentic observability and how they shape platform investment. Develop deep understanding of cost-to-serve by partnering with engineering on the unit economics of the data platform and bring that cost-profile understanding into collaborative discussions with product verticals about customer-facing trade-offs. Surface the customer-positive angles in cost work that engineering-led optimization tickets don't currently make visible. Deliver concise written and verbal communication to executive, engineering, and customer audien

AIGoRustSpring
D
📍 New York, New York, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.2%

From $244K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to join the Logs organization at Datadog and help redefine how our customers ingest, query, and derive insights from logs data. In this role, you’ll work closely with Product Managers and customers to drive complex initiatives across ingestion pipelines, search infrastructure, and intelligent log management capabilities - all while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI and distributed systems. You’ll have the opportunity to lead efforts that shape the future of log management. 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: Partner with Product Managers to define ambiguous product requirements and determine the most impactful solutions for customers Lead technical strategy and execution and design systems surrounding log query performance and ingestion at scale. Explore and prototype new capabilities and collaborate with peers on initiatives spanning AI-powered log management, security and business operations, advanced query capabilities, and external data sources query capabilities. Mentor engineers across levels and contribute to growing a high-performing, collaborative team culture Who You Are: You have deep experience architecting and scaling backend systems, with a strong focus on data-intensive or distributed infrastructure You excel in ambiguous environments, demonstrating a mix of drive, curiosity and pragmatic decision-making You’ve partnered effectively with Product Managers and customers to define product direction and ship impactful features You have expertise in debugging complex systems and optimizing performance across real-time data pipelines You have experience in using AI agents tools in your day-to-day engineering practices You lead by example and enjoy helping others grow through m

M
📍 United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -93.7%

From $151K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Join the MongoDB Server Query Optimization team, and help us build a world-class distributed open-source query optimizer. Our team plays a crucial role in the experience and performance of data processing. We are responsible for the MongoDB Query Language and the lifecycle of each query, through parsing, optimization and plan selection. We have a presence across the US and Europe including New York, Dublin, Seattle, Palo Alto, and Chicago. We support office-based and remote work and align projects with convenient work hours for each time zone. We have tons of interesting problems to solve with a direct impact on users for transactional, time-series, and analytical workloads. The team is endeavoring to systematically rewrite every major component of our optimization and execution systems. We need your help to design and build the heart of a distributed, flexible schema, document database. ​​This role can be based out of our US offices or remotely in the North America region. Candidate Profile 10+ years of experience in data management systems, distributed systems, or large-scale backend engineering Experience with building production-level code with a large user base, robust design structure and rigorous code quality Degree in Computer Science or similar field, or equivalent practical experience, with strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, and software design/architecture Experience with large code bases written in C++ or another systems programming language. You'll need to trace down defects, estimate work complexity, and design evolution and integration strategies as we rewrite different components of the system A strong foundation in core database internals is essential. While direct experience in query optimization is a massive bonus, it is not a prerequisite. We are also excited to meet candidates with strong backgrounds in compilers, language transpilers, or distributed storage systems Position Expectations Innovate in the area of flexible schema d

MongoDBAWSAzureRest
M
📍 United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -93.7%

From $151K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Join the MongoDB Server Query Execution team, and help us build a world-class distributed open-source database. Our team plays a crucial role in the performance and efficiency of MongoDB's data processing. We are responsible for building and improving the core execution engine that powers all queries, taking a logical query plan produced by the optimizer and turning it into reality. This includes developing the physical operators for data retrieval and manipulation, improving the runtime for complex analytical and transactional workloads, and owning critical components such as our new execution engine. In addition to the core server, we support the query execution needs of other major products like Atlas Streams, Atlas Search and Vector Search, and mongosync, making our work vital to the entire MongoDB ecosystem. You will be joining a globally distributed team with a significant presence in both North America and Europe. While this role is based in the NAMER region, you will regularly collaborate closely with colleagues across different time zones. We support both office-based work in our North America hubs like New York, as well as remote work. We have tons of interesting problems to solve with a direct impact on users for transactional, time-series, and analytical workloads. To meet the ever-increasing data demands of modern applications, we are actively evolving our query system; this includes strategically re-architecting and improving key components of our query execution engine. We need your help to design and build the core of a distributed, flexible schema document database. This role can be based out of one of our North America offices, such as NYC or Palo Alto, or remotely across North America. Candidate Profile 10+ years of hands-on, professional experience in query engine development or database internals Experience with building production-level code with a large user base, robust design structure and rigorous code quality Degree in Computer Science or

MongoDBAWSAzureRest
🔔

Get new staff research scientist jobs in United States by email

Daily job updates · Unsubscribe anytime