Founding Research Engineer
Apply NowCompany: Letta
Location: San Francisco, CA 94112
Description:
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.
LLM-driven intelligence is bounded by the inherent limits of the Transformer architecture and its training methods. We believe that LLMs are just one piece of a complete agentic system - to build human-like AI that can reason, plan, learn, and remember, we need to engineer the new computer. At Letta, our research is focused on understanding the fundamental limitations of LLM-driven intelligence, and discovering new ways to advance it.
Unlike research groups at foundation model companies, we focus on research that is model agnostic. This allows us to mix-and-match the best models depending on their capabilities and move fast by avoiding training. We believe that the same level of research advancements that happened at the model layer to enable today's LLMs will also need to happen at the layer above the models to fully leverage model capabilities in compound systems.
As a research engineer, you will work closely with a world-class research team (PhDs from UC Berkeley's BAIR and Sky research labs, behind the MemGPT and "Lost in the Middle" work) on agentic systems, memory, reasoning, and scaling test-time compute. You will help productionize research developments in Letta's OSS framework and cloud platform.
Responsibilities
Skills
Examples of what you might work on
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.
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. Technical take-home ( 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.
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.
LLM-driven intelligence is bounded by the inherent limits of the Transformer architecture and its training methods. We believe that LLMs are just one piece of a complete agentic system - to build human-like AI that can reason, plan, learn, and remember, we need to engineer the new computer. At Letta, our research is focused on understanding the fundamental limitations of LLM-driven intelligence, and discovering new ways to advance it.
Unlike research groups at foundation model companies, we focus on research that is model agnostic. This allows us to mix-and-match the best models depending on their capabilities and move fast by avoiding training. We believe that the same level of research advancements that happened at the model layer to enable today's LLMs will also need to happen at the layer above the models to fully leverage model capabilities in compound systems.
As a research engineer, you will work closely with a world-class research team (PhDs from UC Berkeley's BAIR and Sky research labs, behind the MemGPT and "Lost in the Middle" work) on agentic systems, memory, reasoning, and scaling test-time compute. You will help productionize research developments in Letta's OSS framework and cloud platform.
Responsibilities
- Developing Letta's core agentic reasoning loops, which encompasses tool execution, stream parsing, reasoning, and more.
- Evaluating and improving performance of Letta's agents framework with open models and new model types (e.g. reasoning models)
- Integrating LLM API providers into Letta's framework
Skills
- Extremely strong programming skills in Python
- Understanding of AI/ML fundamentals (Large Language Models)
- Ability to read and understand research papers in the agents/memory space
- Experience in software engineering
Examples of what you might work on
- Adding memory management capabilities to voice agents
- Implementing constrained decoding to improve tool calling in open models
- Systems for multi-agent coordination
- Benchmarking model performance
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.