Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization

About the Company

HUD is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evaluations for frontier AI agents, as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. The platform is used by frontier labs, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. HUD has raised $16 M from top VCs and was part of Y Combinator W25.

About the Role

Research Engineer – privacy and anonymization systems. You will develop methods to detect and remove PII, secrets, and other sensitive information from raw data before it enters processing and synthetic‑data pipelines, owning the full pipeline for protecting privacy while preserving data utility for training agents.

Responsibilities

• Build systems to detect PII, quasi‑identifiers, credentials, and other sensitive information, and design transformations based on data type and downstream use case.
• Develop and benchmark detection approaches that combine rules, statistical models, classifiers, and LLM‑based methods.
• Build production pipelines that anonymize raw data before it enters downstream processing, training, evaluation, or synthetic data generation workflows.
• Create evaluation frameworks that measure privacy risk and retained data utility, including recall‑weighted metrics, leakage tests, and adversarial re‑identification attempts.
• Design systems that remain robust to new data sources, schema drift, unusual formats, and sensitive information embedded in unexpected fields.
• Collaborate with engineering, research, operations, and customers to translate privacy requirements into practical technical policies and safeguards.

Experience

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience building reliable production data or ML systems.
• Experience with information extraction, named‑entity recognition, classification, or related methods for detecting rare or sensitive content.
• Strong experimental instincts and ability to compare approaches across recall, precision, latency, cost, and downstream data utility.
• Understanding of the differences between redaction, masking, pseudonymization, anonymization, and synthetic data—and when each is appropriate.
• High attention to detail and ability to reason about subtle leakage paths, edge cases, and adversarial failure modes.
• Experience building end‑to‑end data processing pipelines without a fully prescribed roadmap.

Additional Qualifications (Strong Candidates May Also Have)

• Hands‑on experience with privacy‑enhancing technologies such as differential privacy, k‑anonymity, secure aggregation, format‑preserving encryption, etc.
• Worked with sensitive data in domains such as healthcare, finance, or security.
• Built low‑latency or high‑throughput ML inference and data‑processing systems.
• Experience in unstructured problem spaces and ownership from early research through production deployment.
• Early‑stage startup experience and strong communication skills for collaboration across teams and time zones.

Team & Company Details

• Team size: ~25 people, mostly full‑time in‑person with some remote members.
• Team composition: 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI, ILO, IPhO), serial AI startup founders, and researchers with publications at ICLR, NeurIPS, etc.
• Company stage: eight‑figure funding, scaling profitably and quickly to meet strong demand.

Logistics

• Employment: Full‑time.
• Location: Offices in San Francisco or Singapore; remote candidates accepted if they can work 70‑80 % overlap with either time zone.
• Visa sponsorship: Support for relocation and visas for strong full‑time candidates to the US or Singapore.
• Timeline: Applications are rolling; interview process includes two technical interviews and a 2‑3 day work trial.

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation.
• 100 % covered top‑of‑the‑line medical, dental, and vision insurance from Blue Shield of CA (US employees).
• Lunch and dinner for in‑office employees.
• Company‑wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays.
• Additional perks: Equinox membership, 401(k), commuter benefits (US employees).
• Unlimited access to tokens for ChatGPT, Claude, Code, Cursor, etc.

For any questions or if you think your application may have been missed, feel free to contact us at [email removed].