ML Research Engineer (Detect & Track Distillation)

Datadog

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 evaluation, and a smooth path from prototype to production.   Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., Bits AI, Bits Evolve, and our time series foundation model), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security.   We are focused on two research areas:   1. World Models for Observability -- 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. 2. Trained Agents for Observability-- 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.   What You'll Do:   * Build and operate multimodal data pipelines, training and evaluation infrastructure, benchmarks, and internal tooling * Implement models, run experiments at scale, and profile for reliability, performance, and cost * Build simulation environments and replay infrastructure for agent training and evaluation * Orchestrate distributed training and distributed RL with Ray, including scheduling, scaling, and failure recovery * Establish rigorous automated benchmarks and regression tests for world model predictions, agent performance, and simulation fidelity * Collaborate with Research Scientists, Product, and Engineering to integrate capabilities into Datadog's products and to harden prototypes into reliable services * Contribute to research publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML), and produce high-quality code, documentation, and open-source artifacts Who You Are:   * You have depth in distributed computing, RL Infra, and ML systems for training and inference at scale; experience with Ray, Slurm, or similar frameworks is a plus * You are proficient in Python, familiar with a systems language (e.g., Rust, C++, or Go), and comfortable with modern cloud and data infrastructure * You have practical experience implementing and operating ML training and inference systems (e.g., PyTorch or JAX), including containerization, orchestration, and GPU acceleration * You have practical experience with large-scale model training and fine-tuning, including frameworks like Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, SkyRL, VeRL, or TorchTitan, and techniques such as SFT, RLVR, RLHF, and efficient inference (quantization, speculative decoding) * You can explain design and performance trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences * You have experience supporting or contributing to research publications   Bonus Points (any of the following):   * You have strong software engineering skills with experience in domains such as observability, SRE, or security * You have experience bridging research prototypes and real-world product applications, especially with large foundation models, world models, or RL-trained agents * You have a passion for pushing the boundaries of AI with a focus on customer impact and scalable deployment * You have hands-on experience with GPU programming and optimization, including CUDA * You have experience writing production data pipelines and applications * You have experience building simulation or sandbox environments for agent training   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: * Competitive global benefits  * New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) * Opportunity to collaborate closely with colleagues across the Datadog offices in New York City and Paris * Opportunity to attend and present at conferences and meetups * Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking * An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)   Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.   About Datadog:  Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) is a global SaaS business, delivering a rare combination of growth and profitability. We are on a mission to break down silos and solve complexity in the cloud age by enabling digital transformation, cloud migration, and infrastructure monitoring of our customers’ entire technology stacks. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries. Together, we champion professional development, diversity of thought, innovation, and work excellence to empower continuous growth. Join the pack and become part of a collaborative, pragmatic, and thoughtful people-first community where we solve tough problems, take smart risks, and celebrate one another. Learn more about #DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.   Equal Opportunity at Datadog: Datadog is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and 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 more. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.   Your Privacy: Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice.   #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.

Datadog

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.   Building on our track record of AI-powered solutions (e.g., Bits AI, Bits Evolve, and our time series foundation model), Datadog AI Research tackles high-risk, high-reward problems grounded in real-world challenges in cloud observability and security.   We are focused on two research areas:   1. World Models for Observability -- 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. 2. Trained Agents for Observability -- 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.   What You'll Do:   * Conduct research in generative AI and machine learning, building specialized foundation models and trained agents for observability * Train multimodal models on large-scale, diverse telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces, topology, events) using distributed training infrastructure * Design and build simulated environments and RL training loops for on-policy agent training and evaluation * Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Product, Engineering) to integrate capabilities like multimodal world modeling and autonomous agents into Datadog's products * Stay at the forefront of foundation models, world models, and RL-based agent research * Contribute to research publications, present at top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, 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, with deep expertise in areas like generative modeling, world models, AI agents, reinforcement learning, or multimodal learning (or have equivalent experience) * You have extensive experience designing and implementing deep learning models and agents, with a strong background in distributed training frameworks (e.g., DeepSpeed, Megatron-LM) and ML libraries (PyTorch) * You have a track record of impactful publications at top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, TMLR) * You are familiar with efficient training, post-training, and inference techniques for large foundation models * You can explain complex models and research findings to both technical and non-technical audiences   Bonus Points (any of the following):   * Experience bridging research and real-world product applications, especially with large foundation models, world models, or RL-trained agents * Passion for pushing the boundaries of AI with a focus on customer impact and scalable deployment * Experience writing production data pipelines and applications * Hands-on experience with GPU programming and optimization, including CUDA   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: * Competitive global benefits  * New hire stock equity (RSUs) and employee stock purchase plan (ESPP) * Opportunity to collaborate closely with colleagues across the Datadog offices in New York City and Paris * Opportunity to attend and present at conferences and meetups * Intra-departmental mentor and buddy program for in-house networking * An inclusive company culture, ability to join our Community Guilds (Datadog employee resource groups)   Benefits and Growth listed above may vary based on the country of your employment and the nature of your employment with Datadog.   About Datadog:  Datadog (NASDAQ: DDOG) is a global SaaS business, delivering a rare combination of growth and profitability. We are on a mission to break down silos and solve complexity in the cloud age by enabling digital transformation, cloud migration, and infrastructure monitoring of our customers’ entire technology stacks. Built by engineers, for engineers, Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries. Together, we champion professional development, diversity of thought, innovation, and work excellence to empower continuous growth. Join the pack and become part of a collaborative, pragmatic, and thoughtful people-first community where we solve tough problems, take smart risks, and celebrate one another. Learn more about #DatadogLife on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Datadog Learning Center.   Equal Opportunity at Datadog: Datadog is an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer and 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 more. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. Here are our Candidate Legal Notices for your reference.   Your Privacy: Any information you submit to Datadog as part of your application will be processed in accordance with Datadog’s Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice.   #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.

Prelude

About Prelude Prelude is redefining how companies authenticate and onboard users - turning what's traditionally a cost center into a growth lever. Our flagship product lets businesses send OTP codes with the best price-to-conversion ratio on the market, dynamically selecting the most effective channel in real time (optimized SMS, WhatsApp, and more) while actively blocking spam and fraud that legacy providers miss. Founded in 2022 by former Zenly team members who lived the pain of broken SMS authentication firsthand, we're already serving fast-growing companies across Europe and are expanding into the US. But authentication is only the starting point - we're building the platform for trust at scale, with an ambitious roadmap of market-defining products ahead. Why join us Today, we're a team of 60 and growing, based in Paris, building products that power secure and high-performance user onboarding for companies across the world. We believe small, highly skilled teams outperform large, fragmented organizations, and we are intentional about staying focused on impact, quality, and speed. We operate with a flat org structure and value in-person collaboration, which helps ideas move faster, decisions stay grounded, and teams take full ownership of what they build. Our values * Care We care deeply about our customers, our teammates, and the quality and reliability of what we ship. * Bias for Action We move fast, test in the real world, and iterate quickly rather than over-optimizing in theory. * Ownership We take responsibility end to end, from identifying problems to delivering outcomes and learning from results. ABOUT THE ROLE Fingerprinting is becoming a first-class pillar of Prelude's fraud detection engine — and this is the founding role that will define it. You will own the entire fingerprinting surface: architecture, research, production systems, and eventually the team we build around you. You'll report directly to leadership and shape the roadmap from scratch. Fraud is an adversarial game. Attackers use emulators, residential proxies, VPNs, device spoofing, and anti-detect tooling to flood our customers' authentication pipelines with fake traffic. Your job is to make that invisible — or at least expensive enough not to be worth it. You'll build the systems that collect, process, and exploit device and network signals at scale: from raw hardware attributes and TLS fingerprints to IP risk scoring and carrier intelligence. You'll combine classical feature engineering with ML to produce high-fidelity risk signals that feed our real-time scoring engine — processing millions of authentication attempts per day in milliseconds. This role sits at the intersection of security research, systems engineering, and applied machine learning. It's for someone who thinks like an attacker, builds like an engineer, and reasons like a data scientist. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING: * Owning the fingerprinting roadmap end to end — from signal collection in our mobile SDKs (iOS, Android) and server-side APIs, to the feature engineering pipelines that turn raw attributes into fraud signals * Building and hardening device fingerprinting systems — persistent device identity across app reinstalls, rooted/emulated device detection, hardware attestation, and spoofing resistance for both web and mobile contexts * Developing network intelligence signals — IP reputation scoring, proxy/VPN/datacenter detection, TLS/JA4 fingerprinting, carrier and MCCMNC enrichment, and residential vs. commercial traffic classification * Applying ML to fingerprinting problems — anomaly detection on device attribute distributions, clustering to identify fraud rings sharing infrastructure, supervised classification of suspicious signal patterns, and adversarial robustness against evolving evasion techniques * Integrating with our real-time scoring engine — producing low-latency features that enrich our per-authentication risk model under strict latency constraints * Researching attacker techniques — reverse-engineering anti-detect tooling, automation frameworks, and bypass techniques to stay ahead of the adversarial curve * Laying the groundwork for a team — defining engineering standards, research practices, and data pipelines that will scale as we hire around you. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR: * 5+ years of experience in a relevant field — fraud detection, bot mitigation, mobile security, or detection engineering; you've shipped systems in production, not just research prototypes * Deep knowledge of device fingerprinting — mobile hardware signals, OS-level attestation (Play Integrity, DeviceCheck, SafetyNet), browser fingerprinting APIs, and spoofing/emulation detection * Hands-on experience with network intelligence — TLS fingerprinting (JA3/JA4), IP enrichment pipelines, proxy/VPN classification, AS number analysis, and carrier-level signals * Applied ML experience in a security context — feature engineering, anomaly detection, clustering, and classification with end-to-end ownership from training through production deployment * An adversarial mindset — you know the attacker landscape (emulators, spoofing techniques, anti-detect browsers, residential proxy networks) and design systems with bypass attempts already in mind * A preference for simple, robust designs over clever, fragile ones — with strong intuition for what will hold up at scale under active adversarial pressure * Fluent English, given our international team and customer base Nice to have: * Familiarity with phone/SIM authentication context, GSMA intelligence, or telco APIs * Experience with JA4 or other network fingerprinting techniques * Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python for backend/data work * Experience with stream processing systems (SQS, Kafka) or OLAP stacks (ClickHouse, Redshift) * iOS or Android SDK internals knowledge * Published research, open-source contributions, or technical writing in the fraud/bot detection space. WHAT CAN WE OFFER YOU? * Competitive compensation package with BSPCEs * Flexible remote policy * 100% travel to the office subsidised * Health insurance via Alan * Urban Sports Club gym membership * We will provide you with the gear you need for your role (a laptop and a phone, for on-call rotations) * Swile meal vouchers * Free snacks and drinks in the office * An annual offsite in a great location (last one was at La Pradet!) * The opportunity to build something from 0-1, and make an impact every day