Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization (Pacific Time)

Pragmatike; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Pragmatike is seeking a Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization to build systems that detect and redact sensitive data before it enters AI training pipelines.

You will own end-to-end privacy tooling—from detection to production—ensuring data utility while protecting privacy. Remote candidates are welcome if hours align with SF or Singapore time; on-site options are in San Francisco or Singapore.

Qualifications

• Fluency in Python and production data or ML systems.
• Experience with information extraction or NER.
• Strong on recall, precision, latency, and cost trade-offs.
• Understanding redaction, masking, pseudonymization, anonymization.
• High attention to detail and robustness to leakage.
• End-to-end data-processing pipeline experience.
• Clear written and spoken English; cross-time-zone collaboration.
• Hands-on privacy tech experience (differential privacy, k-anonymity, etc.) is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build systems to detect PII and sensitive info and design transformations.
• Develop and benchmark detection approaches using rules, models, classifiers, and LLMs.
• Build pipelines that anonymize data before downstream processing.
• Create evaluation frameworks for privacy risk and data utility.
• Design robust systems for new data sources and schemas.
• Collaborate across teams to translate privacy requirements into policies.

Skills

Python

Production systems

Information extraction

Experimentation

Privacy concepts

Data pipelines

English communication

LLM methods

Differential privacy

Job description

Location: San Francisco or Singapore (on-site), or remote (Singapore or US Pacific time zones)
Start Date: ASAP
Languages: English
Team: Engineering

About the Role

Our client is a fast-growing AI company building reliable, fair and open infrastructure for AI training data. Their marketplace helps the people who create data get value for it, and gives AI labs trustworthy data to train on. It is already used by startups, Fortune 500 companies and frontier labs, and the company is backed by leading venture investors, including Y Combinator. They are scaling quickly to meet strong demand.

We are looking for a Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization to build the systems that make sensitive, real-world data safe and still useful for AI training. You will develop methods to detect and remove personally identifiable information, secrets and other sensitive content from raw data before it enters processing and synthetic data pipelines — protecting privacy without destroying the structure and signal that make the data valuable for training agents.

This is a privacy and data-protection engineering seat, not a synthetic-task design role. You will own the pipeline that stands in front of downstream processing, training, evaluation and synthetic generation.

This is a full-time role, starting ASAP. Offices are in San Francisco and Singapore; remote candidates are welcome if their working hours can overlap about 70–80% with either San Francisco (US Pacific) or Singapore business hours. The exact daily schedule will be agreed during hiring.

What You'll Do

• Build systems to detect PII, quasi-identifiers, credentials and other sensitive information, and design transformations based on the data type and the 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.

• 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 stay robust to new data sources, schema drift, unusual formats and sensitive information embedded in unexpected fields.

• Work with engineering, research, operations and customers to translate privacy requirements into practical technical policies and safeguards.

What We're Looking For

• Strong proficiency in Python, and experience building reliable production data or machine-learning systems.

• Experience with information extraction, named-entity recognition, classification, or related methods for detecting rare or sensitive content.

• Strong experimental instincts, and the ability to compare approaches across recall, precision, latency, cost and downstream data utility.

• An understanding of the difference between redaction, masking, pseudonymization, anonymization and synthetic data — and when each is appropriate.

• High attention to detail, and the ability to reason about subtle leakage paths, edge cases and adversarial failure modes.

• Experience building data-processing pipelines end to end, including where there was no fully prescribed roadmap.

• Clear written and spoken English, and comfort collaborating across teams and time zones.

• Strong candidates may also have hands‑on experience with privacy‑enhancing technologies (such as differential privacy, k‑anonymity, secure aggregation or format‑preserving encryption); have worked with sensitive data in healthcare, finance or security; have built low‑latency or high‑throughput ML inference or data-processing systems; or have taken work from early research through to production.

• Technical aptitude and learning potential matter more than years of experience. Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they don't meet every point above.

Why This Role Matters for You

• Make real-world data safe to train on: You will build the systems that let sensitive data be used for AI training without exposing people or secrets.

• Privacy without wrecking utility: The job is not only to redact, but to keep the structure and signal that downstream training and synthetic pipelines need.

• From detection to production: You will own the full path: detection methods, transformations, evaluation, and the pipeline that sits in front of training and generation.

• Hard, high‑stakes edge cases: Work on leakage paths, schema drift and adversarial failure modes, not only clean benchmark datasets.

• San Francisco, Singapore, or remote: Work on‑site in San Francisco or Singapore, or remotely, with hours that overlap about 70–80% with either US Pacific or Singapore business hours. The exact daily schedule will be agreed during hiring.

Pragmatike is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants without discrimination. We recruit on behalf of our clients and prohibit discrimination and harassment based on race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. We are committed to a fair and inclusive hiring process. We process your personal data solely for recruitment purposes, in accordance with applicable privacy laws, and maintain reasonable safeguards to protect your information. Your data may be shared with our client(s) for hiring consideration, but will not be disclosed to third parties outside of the recruitment process.