Research Jobs in New York, USA

<p>Datadog is hiring a Research leader to define the next evolution of our research practice. You will lead a group that integrates human insights with quantitative depth and AI-driven synthesis to build the right products for our customers while driving measurable business impact. At Datadog, we help customers visualize and troubleshoot complex, distributed systems at scale and keep them healthy. As the Director of User Research, you will lead the charge in transforming dense technical signals into human-centric experiences by establishing a research culture that is fast, actionable, and deeply integrated into our product development lifecycle.</p> <p>In this role, you will build a lean, high-impact team of researchers while simultaneously empowering our entire design and product organization with the methods and tools needed to deeply understand customer pain points and motivations. You will be responsible for moving the team beyond tactical, project-level work toward strategic influence that drives measurable business outcomes.</p> <p><br>What you’ll do:</p> <ul> <li>Grow, manage and mentor a talented group of researchers to operate at the frontier of the field.</li> <li>Establish a Mixed-Methods Practice ensuring researchers can analyze product telemetry and statistical data ("the what") alongside qualitative insights ("the why").</li> <li>Scale Research Capabilities by defining inquiry methods and teaching the broader organization (designers and PMs) how to use them to run deep, insight-driven probes.</li> <li>Take accountability for the business metrics influenced by research findings. You will be expected to demonstrate business impact through the work that you lead.</li> <li>Build the foundation for AI as a research collaborator, using tools like custom GPTs and synthetic personas to accelerate synthesis and provide real-time deliverables.</li> <li>Collaborate with the Head of Design, design and cross functional leaders to establish roadmaps and ensure research insights are grounded in both technical reality and user needs.<br><br></li> </ul> <p>Who You Are:</p> <ul> <li>10-15+ years in user research or product design, with experience building and managing high-performing teams.</li> <li>Proficient in both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, with the ability to size and validate behavioral patterns using data.</li> <li>Proven track record of moving research beyond "usability testing" to impacting product direction and business metrics.</li> <li>Comfortable navigating the technical complexities of modern software development and infrastructure.</li> <li>Excited by the potential of AI to transform how research is conducted, synthesized, and shared.</li> </ul> <p><em>Datadog

<p>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 products.</p> <p> </p> <p>Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/bits-ai-sre/">Bits AI</a>, <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/self-optimizing-system/">Bits Evolve</a>, and our <a href="https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/ai/toto-boom-unleashed/">time series foundation model</a>), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security.</p> <p> </p> <p>We are focused on two research areas:</p> <p> </p> <ol> <li><strong>World Models for Observability</strong> -- Training multimodal foundation models that learn the joint dynamics of distributed systems across metrics, traces, logs, topology, and events. These models power advanced forecasting, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, counterfactual simulation ("what if?"), and provide a learned planning backbone for our autonomous agents.</li> <li><strong>Trained Agents for Observability </strong>-- Post-training models to operate autonomously across Datadog's domain. SRE incident response is our first target, with a clear path to code repair, security response, and infrastructure optimization. We build the simulation environments, RL training loops, and evaluation infrastructure needed to train agents that match or surpass frontier models at a fraction of the cost.</li> </ol> <p> </p> <p><strong>What You'll Do:</strong></p> <p> </p> <ul> <li>Conduct research in generative AI and machine learning, building specialized foundation models and trained agents for observability</li> <li>Train multimodal models on large-scale, diverse telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces, topology, events) using distributed training infrastructure</li> <li>Design and build simulated environments and RL training loops for on-policy agent training and evaluation</li> <li>Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering) to integrate capabilities like multimodal world modeling and autonomous agents into Datadog's products</li> <li>Stay at the forefront of foundation models, world models, and RL-based agent research</li> <li>Contribute to research publications, present at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), and help open-source key model artifacts and benchmarks</li> </ul> <p> </p> <p><strong>Who You Are:</st