Senior Applied Scientist - Behavior AI

The Behavior AI team builds the AI-based anomaly detection behind Datadog's security products. Our models learn what normal looks like across the billions of logs, events, and telemetry records flowing through the platform every second, and they flag the behavior that does not fit, on every record, in real time, at a cost that makes sense at our scale. What we build does not ship to a single feature. The same models power detection across many of Datadog's security products at once, so the work has impact well beyond any one team. Large general-purpose models are too slow and too expensive to run in that path, so we take the opposite approach: small, custom models, designed for high-throughput stream processing and optimized to run cheaply on every record.

We are hiring a Senior Applied Scientist to build these models from start to finish. You will contribute to designing the architecture, training at scale, and the optimization work that takes a model from training to running efficiently on production traffic. This optimization requires a deep understanding of the constraints imposed by both the software and the hardware, together with the applied mathematics to work within them: often it comes down to finding a mathematical reformulation that fits those constraints better, and that judgment can decide whether a model reaches production at all.

The work involves a number of open questions. How do you obtain most of the quality of a large model from one that is far smaller and cheap enough to run on the full stream? Where is it worth trading exactness for speed, and how do you reason about the error you accept? How do you make a small model's outputs clear enough that the detection engineers and analysts who rely on it can trust what it reports? If these are the problems you want to work on, we would like to hear from you.

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