---
title: 'Research Engineer, Operations at Basis Research Institute'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-operations-basis-research-institute-new-york-55vvr38p29sn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Research Engineer, Operations at Basis Research Institute

- **Company:** Basis Research Institute
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2025-11-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/basis-research/0bd1e779-d61e-478b-be98-9ca1e5e08d6f

## Job description

## About Basis

[Basis](https://www.basis.ai) 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.

Non-Discrimination Notice Basis Research Institute provides equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or genetics and prohibits discrimination based on all protected characteristics.

Privacy Notice By submitting your application, you grant Basis permission to use your materials for both hiring evaluation and recruitment-related research and development purposes. Your information may be processed in different countries, including the US. You retain copyright while providing Basis a license to use these materials for the stated purposes. Read our full Global Data Privacy Notice [here](https://www.basis.ai/join-us/privacy-notice/).

## About Basis Research Institute

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Basis Research Institute is a nonprofit applied research organization advancing artificial intelligence through probabilistic modeling and causal inference to solve society's most intractable problems, building open-source software that draws inspiration from human reasoning.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Nonprofit 501(c)(3) Research Institute)
- **Headquarters**: New York City, New York, USA (with additional office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Zenna Tavares, Emily Mackevicius, and Eli Bingham

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial Intelligence Research & Development
- **Target customers**: Municipal governments (via consulting), academic collaborators, for-profit companies (via contract work), and the broader open-source AI community
- **Mission**: Two mutually reinforcing goals: (1) advance basic scientific research in artificial intelligence to understand and build intelligence, and (2) help solve society’s intractable problems by expanding the scale, complexity, and breadth of problems that can be solved

## Products & Services
- **Core Technology Development**: Advanced probabilistic modeling and causal inference frameworks implemented as open-source software, including causal probabilistic programming languages
- **Applied Challenge Projects**:
  - **AI-Driven Robot Design**: Using AI to automate and accelerate robot design and control
  - **Dynamical Modeling for Biological Systems**: Modeling complex biological processes (e.g., neuroscience, cellular dynamics)
  - **Participatory City Modeling**: Consulting with municipal governments to model urban systems and support data-driven policy decisions
  - **Modeling, Abstraction, and Reasoning Agent (MARA)**: A research project focused on building AI agents capable of abstract reasoning and world modeling
- **Postdoctoral Fellowship Program**: A fellowship for early-career scientists to direct their own research within Basis’s mission
- **Open-Source Software Releases**: Publishing research tools and libraries for the broader AI community

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not applicable (nonprofit research organization)
- **Key Metric**: Funded through a combination of research grants, private philanthropy, and contract work with partners; specific funding amounts are not publicly disclosed
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Supported by an advisory board including Armando Solar-Lezama (MIT), Joshua Tenenbaum (MIT), Kevin Ellis (Cornell), Anthony Philippakis (Broad Institute), and Rui Costa (Columbia University). Collaborates with academic institutions (MIT, Columbia, Cornell, NYU) and municipal governments
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount has grown 41.7% year-over-year (LinkedIn data); active job postings increased 107.1% year-over-year; expanding into London with a GTM Lead role; 29 active job openings as of mid-2026

## Competitive Advantages
- **Nonprofit Structure**: Unlike for-profit AI labs, Basis is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, enabling it to prioritize open-source, public-good research over commercial outcomes
- **Unique Research Cycle**: A structured cycle between core technology development and applied challenge projects, where insights from real-world problems feed back into foundational research
- **Interdisciplinary Approach**: Combines insights from cognitive science (human reasoning), computer science (probabilistic programming), and domain expertise (biology, urban planning, robotics)
- **High-Profile Advisory Board**: Advisors from leading institutions (MIT, Cornell, Broad Institute, Columbia) provide deep academic and scientific credibility
- **Open-Source Commitment**: All software is released as open-source, building community trust and enabling broad adoption

## Strategic Focus
- **Core AI Foundations**: Advancing probabilistic modeling, causal inference, program synthesis, neuro-symbolic methods, reinforcement learning, and world models
- **Challenge-Driven Research**: Using applied projects (robotics, biology, city modeling) to identify shared bottlenecks that guide further methodological research
- **Collaborative Expansion**: Actively seeking partnerships with academia, government, social sector, and industry to tackle high-impact problems
- **Geographic Growth**: Opening presence in London (UK/EU GTM) and expanding roles in Ithaca, NY, while maintaining NYC and Cambridge hubs
- **Open-Source Ecosystem**: Building durable foundations that enable other researchers and practitioners to build upon Basis’s work

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven Culture**: Employees work on problems that matter beyond publications, with impact on AI science and real-world societal challenges
- **Autonomy and Growth**: Organizational structure allows employees to see their autonomy and responsibilities grow with their projects, distinct from traditional career ladders
- **Collaborative Environment**: Work alongside researchers from top institutions (MIT, Columbia, Cornell) and domain experts from academia, government, and industry
- **Open-Source Impact**: Ship high-quality open-source software used by thousands, contributing to the broader AI community
- **Locations**: Offices in NYC (primary) and Cambridge, MA, with remote flexibility for some roles; London expansion underway
- **Notable Perks**: Postdoctoral fellowships available for early-career scientists; focus on human values and collaborative organization
- **Engineering Culture**: Emphasis on building durable foundations, shipping production-quality code, and working at the intersection of research and engineering

## Sources
1. [basis.ai/about](https://www.basis.ai/about/)
2. [basis.ai](https://www.basis.ai/)
3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/basis-research](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/basis-research)
4. [basis.ai/join-us](https://www.basis.ai/join-us/)
5. [LinkedIn - Basis Research Institute](https://www.linkedin.com/company/basis-ri)

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