About the role#
Datadog AI Research (DAIR) is partnering with Carnegie Mellon University to support PhD students working on open research problems. You will work on projects grounded in real-world challenges like detecting failures, diagnosing issues, and helping engineers operate complex software environments. This program provides access to compute and data at a scale typically unavailable in academic labs.
What you'll do#
- Own a research project from start to finish, including framing the question, running experiments, and writing up findings.
- Work directly with a DAIR mentor while maintaining ties to your university lab and faculty advisor.
- Publish your work and apply your findings toward your dissertation.
- Translate research into practical systems that reach production.
- Collaborate with colleagues who are investigating the same research questions.
What you'll need#
- Current enrollment in a PhD program at Carnegie Mellon in computer science, machine learning, statistics, or a related field.
- Depth in at least one relevant area, such as specialized foundation models, post-training and evaluating AI agents, or building frontier-scale machine learning systems.
- Comfort running real experiments, including training models, working with GPUs, and reimplementing recent papers.
- Evidence of research capability, such as conference papers, preprints, open-source contributions, or in-depth lab projects.
- Research taste and the ability to explain the significance of a problem.
- A commitment to honest empiricism, including reporting results that do not work.
- Support from your faculty advisor.
Location & details#
- Locations: New York, New York, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
- Modality: Hybrid.
- Employment: Full-time paid internship.
- Term: Rolling.
About Datadog
Datadog is a software development company that provides a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. It aggregates data from servers, databases, containers, and third-party services to provide visibility into technology stacks. Founded in 2010, the company is based in New York and maintains a workforce of over 10,000 employees. It serves DevOps teams by helping them manage performance and reduce downtime.
How to get in at Datadog
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