Research Engineer, Operations

About Basis

Basis is a nonprofit applied AI research organization with two mutually reinforcing goals.

The first is to understand and build intelligence. This means to establish the mathematical principles of what it means to reason, to learn, to make decisions, to understand, and to explain; and to construct software that implements these principles.

The second is to advance society's ability to solve intractable problems. This means expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems that we can solve today, and even more importantly, accelerating our ability to solve problems in the future.

To achieve these goals, we're building both a new technological foundation that draws inspiration from how humans reason, and a new kind of collaborative organization that puts human values first.

About the Role

Research Engineers in Operations at Basis build the internal tooling, automation, and measurement systems that multiply researcher productivity and operational efficiency. You will create tools that save hours of manual work, automate proposal and CRM workflows, and provide analytics that inform strategic decisions as Basis scales.

We are looking for people who excel technically and understand research workflows deeply enough to identify high-leverage automation opportunities. The ideal Research Engineer has experience translating research ideas into robust code, building LLM-powered automation systems, and creating tools that researchers actually want to use. You will build everything from researcher productivity tools to GTM automation to analytics infrastructure.

This role is critical to Basis's scaling strategy. You will be among the first to transform Basis operations from manual processes to automated systems that enable growth without diminishing returns.

We seek individuals who excel technically and value probing concepts at their foundations. Our research engineers aspire to build rigorous, high-quality, robust tools, unafraid to tinker, make mistakes, and explore radically different ideas to achieve this.

Basis is a collaborative effort, both internally and with our external partners; we are looking for people who enjoy enabling others to accomplish work at scales they couldn't reach alone.

We expect you to:

• Possess excellent programming and software engineering skills, especially in Julia, Python, C++, ML-family languages. Have demonstrated the ability to drive software projects from start to finish.
• Be comfortable digesting research from PL and/or ML venues, such as PLDI, POPL, NeurIPS, or ICML. Progress with a high degree of autonomy and under uncertainty.
• Have experience with LLM-powered automation, including using language models (OpenAI API, Anthropic Claude, LangChain) for intelligent automation, workflow orchestration, and agent-based systems.
• Have demonstrated significant technical achievements within ML engineering. Examples include:
  
  • You've implemented variants of newly published techniques from scratch
  • You build systems and workflows for training large models distributed across many machines
  • You've built systems that span all levels of the programming stack from high-level API infrastructure to close-to-the-metal code
• Understand research and operational workflows well enough to identify high-impact automation opportunities. You might have worked in research environments, built productivity tools, or supported technical teams through infrastructure.
• Be skilled at user-centric design for internal tools. You naturally seek user feedback, iterate based on real usage, and measure success by adoption and time saved rather than technical sophistication.
• Be excited about force-multiplying impact. The tools you build might not be externally visible, but they enable Basis to solve intractable problems at scales we couldn't otherwise reach.

Responsibilities:

• Build researcher productivity tools including experiment tracking, literature research automation, computational environment management, and integration with existing research workflows.
• Develop GTM and business operations automation including CRM systems, pipeline management, proposal generation, contract tracking, and customer communication workflows.
• Create analytics and measurement infrastructure providing visibility into research progress, operational metrics, resource utilization, and progress toward strategic objectives.
• Automate operational processes for recruiting (candidate tracking, scheduling, communication), marketing (content generation, social media, events), and cross-functional workflows that currently require manual coordination.
• Build internal APIs and integrations connecting various systems (Notion, Linear, email, calendars, Slack) to create seamless workflows and eliminate manual data transfer.
• Implement AI/LLM-powered tools leveraging latest capabilities in language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration to create intelligent automation.
• Translate research ideas into correct, robust, and scalable high-quality code, engaging in performance engineering and scaling research code.
• Contribute to the culture and direction of Basis by modeling technical excellence in internal tools, continuous improvement mindset, and focus on enabling high-leverage work.

Role Details

Exceptional candidates who may not meet all of the following criteria are still encouraged to apply.

• FT/PT: Full-time.
• In-person Policy: We are in the office four days a week. Be prepared to attend multi-day Basis-wide in-person events.
• Location: New York City.
• Salary range: Competitive salary.

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