Research Scientist, Machine Learning / Ai

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 scientists lead Basis’ efforts to develop a deeper understanding of the conceptual, mathematical, and computational principles of intelligence.

We are looking for people who are technically excellent, and who value probing concepts at their foundations. Our research scientists/engineers aspire to do rigorous, high-quality, robust science, but are not afraid to tinker, make mistakes, and explore radically different ideas in order to get there.

Basis is a collaborative effort, both internally and with our external partners; we are looking for people who enjoy working with others on problems larger than ones they can tackle alone.

We expect you to:

• Have demonstrated an ability to do scientific research that is of high-quality. Possible ways to demonstrate this include publications, technical reports, and software projects.

In addition, the following would be an advantage:

• PhD (or equivalent experience) in technical areas, including: statistics, programming languages, machine learning, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, physics, mathematics.
• Excited about solving real world problems and having positive societal impact.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the culture and direction of Basis
• Distill insights from solving problems into more general mathematical and computational theories
• In close collaboration with domain experts inside and especially outside Basis, work as a team member to help solve scientific and societal problems
• (Optionally) Publish and present findings in journals and conferences
• Develop and maintain open-source software
• Develop and explore computational theories of intelligence, including reasoning, learning, and decision-making.

Role Details

• Location: We are a distributed organization and will consider all applicants regardless of location. Current team members are clustered around the New York City and Boston areas.
• Salary range: competitive salary and bonuses
• FT/PT: This is a full-time position
• Hours: Working hours will be mostly flexible — you will work towards outcomes. There are certain fixed times during the week when you will be expected to be available to attend meetings. There will also be in-person events spanning several days that you will attend.