Job details

Research Engineer

We’re building the AI that runs companies.

Sapien is the intelligence layer for enterprise finance. Our agents deeply understand companies across their massive, key financial data sources from Excels to ERPs to CRMs. Why? The world’s largest companies are flying blind. The most crucial financial infrastructure is scarily fragile, and multi-million-dollar decisions are made every day relying on slow and inaccurate analyses.

We’re productizing the cutting edge of research to build systems that go beyond information querying to work alongside finance teams, executing complex workflows and enabling actions that drive growth. Over time, Sapien learns more about how companies operate and builds unique, specific intuitions just as humans do so it can adapt to the most important nuances—becoming what we like to call the "shadow CFO".

We’re solving the hardest technical problems to enable humans to do more of what matters: the high-level strategic decision making, while doing less of what doesn’t: the low-level data gathering and number crunching that dominates human financial work. Sapien is already deployed at manufacturing, software, and services businesses where we’re saving hundreds of hours, understanding models to enable new forms of analysis, and even uncovering multi-million dollar mistakes (the largest so far is $12M+).

Can AI run a company? We’re proving that it can.

The Role

To build Sapien, we have to tackle the hardest problems in agent capabilities and verifiability. Your main work will consist of building out our agent backbone and company representations that enable Sapien to reason over complex data, execute verifiable and observable processes, and build deeper intelligence about companies and financials over time. Some key ideas you'd work on include:

Implementing new agent architectures for observability, HITL, and controlling context
Employing library learning to reduce LLM dependencies for planning, codegen, and data localization
Building graphs of data and methods of searching through it efficiently using embeddings and semantic clustering
Parsing different modalities such as Excel and integrations into a unified schema
RL and fine-tuning based on user interactions/pairwise data signals
Benchmarking and evaluation suites to quantify Sapien’s performance

Who Are You?

End-to-end thinking with a deeply technical background is essential to succeed in tackling the hard problems we’re working on. Some good signals of this tend to include:

Strong engineering skills and intuitions—experience solving complex, open-ended problems
Deep algorithmic thinking, often developed through ML research or competitive programming/math
Experience building production-grade systems/deployed models at scale

More generally, we’re excited about:

People with a deep desire to own hard problems across their entire loop, taking challenges all the way from research to product.
People who love solving new, open-ended problems every single day—adapting fast to new, seemingly impossible settings
People whose friends would describe them, above all, as curious. People who obsess over the "why" and love pushing their thinking as far as possible.
People that deeply care about what they’re working on, bringing in new knowledge from papers and engineering blogs they’ve read to engage in thought-provoking discussions

The Sapien Culture

We believe in R&P: research and product. We’re a talent-dense team that aims to excel in all dimensions, pushing bounds of possibility by iterating rapidly. We bring this passion from all previous walks of life, whether it was hacking government facilities, winning top research awards, being top global golfers, blowing up testing liquid-fueled rockets, and much more.

We build everything in-house and are constantly shipping feature-enabling improvements to customers. Our goal is to move fast and iterate relentlessly with customers—gathering data on which features are most useful or accurate, and the way in which users interact with them. Every day, we push both our underlying technical architectures and our product experience to new limits—aiming to always be tech-first, but user-centric.

We’re based in San Francisco, with plans to move to NYC in the coming months to be even closer to customers. We’re a tight-knit, energetic team that love spending long hours nerding out about hard problems, reading papers, or whiteboarding logic puzzles. And we occasionally let loose over poker nights, spikeball matches, sports watch parties, movie nights, hackathons, philosophical debates, among many other events at our office.

Application Process

Submit your application here and we’ll reach out to chat further if there’s a good fit! Our process consists of a 2-3 chats/technical interviews and a take-home assignment. We then do an in-person work trial to really get to know each other, dig deeper into the technical work we do, and discuss ideas.

Average salary estimate

$140000 / YEARLY (est.)

min

max

$120000K

$160000K

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What You Should Know About Research Engineer, Sapien

If you're a problem-solver with a deep technical background looking to make a real impact, Sapien is excited to welcome you as a Research Engineer! We’re building the AI that runs companies, revolutionizing how financial data is processed and utilized. At Sapien, we focus on creating an intelligence layer that understands and analyzes complex financial data from various sources, empowering finance teams to make better strategic decisions. Your role will involve tackling difficult challenges in agent capabilities and verifiability to enhance our systems. You’ll be key in implementing innovative agent architectures and developing advanced data representation techniques. Your curiosity and passion for research will shine as you work on everything from library learning to enhancing user interactions. We value end-to-end thinkers who enjoy wrestling with complex problems and who are as obsessed as we are with understanding the intricate workings of companies. Our culture is driven by a mix of rigorous research and a commitment to product excellence, and we're keen to discuss your ideas and contributions as we iterate rapidly towards our goals. If you're ready to push boundaries and contribute to our dynamic team, let’s explore how you can fit into Sapien’s vision of transforming the finance industry with AI. Join us in our collaborative environment, where every idea matters, and let’s redefine what’s possible together!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) for Research Engineer Role at Sapien

What are the main responsibilities of a Research Engineer at Sapien?

As a Research Engineer at Sapien, your primary responsibilities will include building out our agent backbone and company representations, enabling Sapien to process and analyze complex data more efficiently. You’ll implement new agent architectures, work on library learning to optimize data processing, and develop sophisticated searching methodologies using embeddings. Your work will involve ensuring that Sapien can learn from user interactions and provide increasingly valuable financial insights over time.