Research Engineer, Platform

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 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.

Research Engineers on the Platform team at Basis advance research methods and package them into reusable modules that others can build on. You will develop Basis core technology modules (fundamental algorithmic components like Chi Rho, Effectful, Weighted), contribute research-driven capabilities to commercial platform offerings, and ensure research advances have clear paths to impact—whether commercial or societal.

We are looking for people who bridge research excellence and engineering rigor. The ideal Research Engineer has both published research and shipped production code, understands how to translate experimental techniques into robust implementations, and thinks carefully about software architecture that enables others to build on your work. You will identify high-value research problems aligned with Basis mission and develop them from ideation through concrete implementation.

This role is distinguished from Operations Research Engineers (who focus on internal tooling) by emphasis on advancing research methods for platform and commercial applications. You will work on Core Tech Module Teams and contribute to research that defines Basis’s technological foundation.

We seek individuals who excel technically and value probing concepts at their foundations. Our research engineers aspire to do rigorous, high-quality, robust science and engineering, but are not afraid to tinker, make mistakes, and explore radically different ideas to get there.

Basis is a collaborative effort, both internally and with our external partners; we are looking for people who enjoy working with others on problems larger than ones they can tackle alone.

We expect you to:

• Have demonstrated ability to conduct research that is of high quality
  . Possible ways to demonstrate this include:
• • Publications at top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, POPL, PLDI, OOPSLA)
  • Technical reports or preprints showing novel research contributions
  • Open-source research projects with significant adoption or citations
• Have demonstrated ability to drive software projects from start to finish
  . This could be evidenced by:
• • Research code released as production-quality libraries or frameworks
  • Contributions to major open-source projects (PyTorch, Tensor Flow, JAX, or equivalents)
  • Systems built that span research prototypes through deployable implementations
• Possess deep knowledge of relevant technical areas including probabilistic programming, causal inference, program synthesis, neural architectures, or related fields central to Basis research directions.
• Be proficient in research engineering tools including Python, PyTorch/JAX, version control, testing frameworks, documentation systems, and software engineering practices that make research code maintainable and extensible.
• Understand paths from research to impact
  . You think about how research advances can translate to commercial applications, platform capabilities, or open-source contributions that benefit broader communities.
• Value software quality and reusability
  . You design modules that others can build on, write comprehensive documentation and tests, and architect systems that remain coherent as they evolve.
• Progress with autonomy and intellectual curiosity
  . You can identify valuable research directions, design experiments, implement solutions, and evaluate results without extensive direction.
• Be excited about solving real-world…