Research Science Intern (PhD)

Datadog AI Research — Scholars Program with Carnegie Mellon University Datadog AI Research (DAIR) is partnering with Carnegie Mellon University to support a small number of PhD students working on open research problems grounded by ongoing efforts at Datadog/DAIR. You will frame a problem, run your own experiments, and write up what you find, with compute and data at a scale most academic labs cannot provide. You will collaborate with colleagues working on the same questions. The Lab And The Research: DAIR is an industrial research lab motivated by practical challenges in observability and software operation: detecting and diagnosing failures, understanding complex production environments, and helping engineers operate software more effectively. The lab focuses on creating specialized foundation models, post-training and evaluating AI agents, and building frontier-scale machine learning systems. By combining fundamental research with Datadog's large-scale, real-world data and infrastructure, the lab develops new AI capabilities and translates them into practical systems with meaningful impact. Internship projects are shaped with your DAIR mentor and your CMU faculty advisor. You do not need prior experience with observability, monitoring, or infrastructure. What You'll Do: Own a research project end to end: framing the question, running the experiments, writing it up Work directly with a DAIR mentor engaged in the same problem, and stay connected to your advisor and lab Publish, and use the work toward your dissertation See research reach production, when it works Who You Are: Currently enrolled in a PhD program at Carnegie Mellon in machine learning, computer science, statistics, or a related field Depth in at least one area relevant to the research above Comfort running real experiments — training models, working with GPUs, reading and reimplementing recent papers Evidence you can do research: conference or workshop papers, preprints, open-source contributions, or