Founding Research Scientist

Our background

Letta is a company founded around the MemGPT project (13k+ GitHub stars). The founding team comes from the same research lab and PhD advisors at Berkeley that produced Spark (→ Databricks) and Ray (→ Anyscale). We have deep expertise in both AI and systems, are currently hiring a founding team of exceptional engineers to join us in building the next generation of LLM agent technology.

👾 You can read more about Letta on TechCrunch and our blog.

Your role

Our goal as a company is to empower developers to build state-of-the-art LLM agents to power their own applications. To achieve this, we need to build and maintain a strong lead in our underlying agent technology. As a Research Scientist, your primary responsibility will be to design and execute an R&D strategy to ensure that the company’s core LLM agent technology remains state-of-the-art. Simply put, your mission is to push the limits of what is possible with LLMs.

Responsibilities:

• R&D of the core agent framework, including context management techniques used to prompt the LLMs within the agent framework

  • Prototyping new context management and memory systems (e.g. better state→prompt compilers, more complex memory systems, multi-threading of multiple LLM processes, improved planning for multi-step reasoning, etc.)

  • Development of the agent interaction loop, encompassing tool execution, parsing, and more

• R&D of LLM serving methods to improve serving agent workloads (e.g. constrained decoding and prefix caching)

• Model evaluation and finetuning, such as finetuning state-of-the-art open-weights models on agent data traces (which we plan to release publicly as free models on HuggingFace)

Technical reports and blog posts: As our founding research scientist, you will also have significant agency in writing and publishing technical blog posts and whitepapers, which will be an important driver of our marketing and recruiting efforts.

Compute resources: You will be provided with significant resources to accomplish your work, including access to the latest GPUs for training/finetuning via both spot and reserved instances, and a dedicated budget for model serving and API credits across all the frontier model providers.

Our hiring process

We are hiring a small, tight-knit team of exceptionally talented founding engineers. Every hire matters, so we take the hiring process very seriously.

1. Initial phone interview (30m video call): We want to learn more about your background, your skills, your opinions on open source AI, and why you want to work at an early stage AI startup.

2. Technical take-home (<1hr assessment): To get a better sense of your skillset, we’ll give you an example problem to work that’s as targeted to your potential day-to-day work as possible.

3. Paid workday (in-person recommended): As the final step in the interview process, we’ll simulate working together as closely as possible by giving you a real (or as close to real as possible) task to work on for a day - and paying for your time of course. If you live in the Bay Area, we highly recommend visiting our offices in-person! We’re an in-person company, so working at our office will give you a great idea of what it will be like to join as a full-time member of the team.