Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
Build privacy and anonymization systems for an AI infrastructure team, helping make sensitive real-world data safer to use in model training and evaluation. You will develop end-to-end methods that protect sensitive information while preserving the structure and utility of data.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build systems to detect PII, quasi-identifiers, credentials, and other sensitive information, then choose transformations suited to the data and its downstream use.
- Develop and benchmark detection approaches using rules, statistical models, classifiers, and LLM-based methods.
- Build production pipelines that anonymize data before it enters processing, training, evaluation, or synthetic data workflows.
- Create evaluation frameworks for privacy risk and retained utility, including recall-weighted metrics, leakage tests, and adversarial re-identification attempts.
- Design systems that handle new data sources, schema drift, unusual formats, and sensitive information in unexpected fields.
- Collaborate across engineering, research, operations, and customer-facing teams to turn privacy requirements into practical safeguards.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least 2 years of experience building production data or ML systems with strong Python skills.
- Hands-on experience detecting, removing, or anonymizing PII while preserving useful data characteristics.
- Experience with information extraction, named-entity recognition, classification, or related methods for detecting sensitive or rare content.
- Experience building end-to-end data processing pipelines and working through open-ended problems from research to production.
- Ability to compare methods across recall, precision, latency, cost, and downstream data utility.
- Understanding of redaction, masking, pseudonymization, anonymization, and synthetic data generation.
- Experience with privacy-enhancing technologies such as differential privacy, k-anonymity, secure aggregation, or format-preserving encryption is valuable.
- Experience with sensitive data in healthcare, finance, security, or related fields, and with high-throughput or low-latency ML systems, is a plus.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary: $130,000 to $225,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.