Research Engineer

About us

• At Sierra, we’re building a platform to enable every company in the world to build their own autonomous AI agents for everything from customer service to commerce. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta and London.

• We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do.

• Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. 

What you'll do

• As a Research Engineer at Sierra, you will work with our research and engineering teams to propel Sierra to the forefront of AI technology.

• Use your ML and engineering expertise to help design and manage data pipelines, evaluate benchmarks, and model training infrastructure.

• Train and fine-tune models, build new agent architectures, and run large-scale experiments to improve performance on both external and internal benchmarks iteratively.

• Help integrate product and research by developing prototypes and translating them to production.

• Contribute to the research community by publishing findings as research papers and participating in conferences and workshops.

What you'll bring

• Knowledge of basic machine learning methods, especially those related to natural language processing and generative models.

• Ability to design and run ML research experiments, engineer prototypes, and build infrastructure and tooling for processing data.

• At least 3-4 years of industry experience (can be primarily in engineering roles, as long as you have a basic understanding of ML concepts).

• Ability to collaborate with internal partners across Research and Engineering teams and external partners in business, research, and academic organizations.

• Practical knowledge of one or more modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, Hugging Face, Weights and Biases, Deepspeed, JAX, or Tensorflow.

Even better...

• Published work at top conferences such as ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP.

• Open-source ML projects.

Our values

• Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work.

• Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it.

• Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve.

• Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time.

• Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements.

What we offer

We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees:

• Flexible (Unlimited) Paid Time Off

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family

• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits

• Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension) with Sierra match

• Parental Leave

• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot (U.S. only)

• Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized 

• Discretionary Benefit Stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most

• Free alphorn lessons

These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies.

Be you, with us

We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.