Research Engineer, Operations

About the role

At Basis, you will architect and ship the internal systems that let world-class researchers operate at unprecedented scale. You will own the end-to-end lifecycle of critical operational tools, from initial discovery and requirements gathering through robust implementation and ongoing optimization. Your work will directly remove friction from the research process by automating repetitive tasks and building intuitive data-driven interfaces for complex workflows. You will design systems that learn from usage patterns and continuously improve their own utility and reliability. This role demands a deep partnership mindset, where you translate ambiguous operational needs into concrete technical solutions with production-grade quality. You will be responsible for ensuring that every tool you deliver measurably increases the throughput and focus of the entire research organization.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and implement researcher productivity platforms that automate experiment tracking, literature synthesis, and computational environment orchestration using advanced software design patterns.
• Engineer and deploy LLM-powered automation agents that handle proposal drafting, CRM data synchronization, and dynamic workflow orchestration across distributed research teams.
• Design and maintain analytics dashboards that transform raw operational data into strategic insights, enabling leadership to make evidence-based decisions about research priorities.
• Build robust internal APIs and integration layers that unify communication, project management, and version control systems into a single coherent operational fabric.
• Implement scalable data pipelines and infrastructure components that support the full range of Basis research activities from data ingestion to model evaluation.
• Drive the end-to-end delivery of GTM operations tooling, including automated contract review, pipeline visualization, and intelligent customer communication systems.
• Establish rigorous testing and monitoring frameworks to ensure operational tools remain reliable, performant, and secure as Basis scales to enterprise-level usage.
• Partner closely with researchers and product teams to identify high-leverage automation opportunities and validate the real-world impact of implemented solutions.
• Champion user-centric design principles by conducting interviews, analyzing usage metrics, and iterating on tool interfaces to maximize adoption and efficiency gains.
• Explore and prototype radical new approaches to operational automation, evaluating emerging techniques in language models, retrieval systems, and distributed computing.
• Create detailed technical specifications and documentation that enable other engineers to understand, extend, and maintain complex operational systems.
• Lead the translation of ambiguous business requirements into well-defined technical tasks with clear acceptance criteria and success metrics.
• Implement advanced data models for tracking research progress, resource allocation, and strategic alignment across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Continuously refactor and optimize existing tooling to reduce technical debt and improve performance, reliability, and developer experience.

Requirements

You must possess a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a closely related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. You have a proven track record of professional software development with at least three years of hands-on experience building production-grade systems. Demonstrate advanced proficiency in multiple modern programming languages, especially Julia, Python, and C++, along with fluency in ML-oriented languages and frameworks. You have successfully implemented software systems that span the full computing stack from high-level API design to low-level performance optimization. Experience reading and implementing research papers from venues such as PLDI, POPL, NeurIPS, or ICML is essential for success in this role. You have substantial experience developing and deploying LLM-powered automation, including work with OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, LangChain, or similar platforms for building agentic systems. You have a strong history of delivering complex software projects independently and thriving in environments with high uncertainty and evolving requirements. You understand research workflows deeply enough to identify automation opportunities that create disproportionate value for technical teams. You approach problems with a rigorous, engineering-minded perspective and a commitment to building solutions that are maintainable, observable, and correct.

Nice to have

Experience building and operating distributed training systems for large language models or other high-parameter neural architectures. A demonstrated history of creating tools that were adopted and relied upon by multiple research teams. Familiarity with formal methods or proof assistants as they relate to ensuring correctness of critical infrastructure.

Practical notes

This role is full-time based in the New York Office. No visa sponsorship is currently available for this position. Relocation to New York is expected within a reasonable timeframe. The start date is dependent on business needs and should be discussed after an offer is extended.