RefolkCandidates
Open nowEngineeringTechnical Staff - Research

Research Engineer / Scientist, Memory

Letta · San Francisco, California

Location
San Francisco, California, USA
Employment
Full time
Level
Mid level
Posted
12 months ago

About this role

Solving Self-Improving Superintelligence

The human brain is a sponge. Today’s AI brains are brittle and rigid. At Letta, we’re building self-improving artificial intelligence: creating agents that continually learn from experience and adapt over time.

Founded by the creators of MemGPT from UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab (the birthplace of Spark and Ray). Backed by Jeff Dean, Clem Delangue, and pioneers across AI infrastructure. Our agents already power production systems at companies like 11x and Bilt Rewards, learning and improving every day.

We’re assembling a world-class team of researchers and engineers to solve AI’s hardest problem: making machines that can reason, remember, and learn the way humans do.

Note that this role is in-person (no hybrid), 5 days a week in downtown San Francisco.

Your role

You will design the long-term memory architecture for LLMs. At Letta, you'll work with a world-class, tight-knit team of AI researchers and engineers towards our vision of self-improving superintelligence. Advance the field through open publishing of research through papers, technical reports, blog posts, and open-source code.

What You’re Responsible For:

  • Defining the key abstractions of the LLM memory layer

  • Building memory architectures that support multiple memory types including temporal sequences, episodic experiences, semantic knowledge, and procedural skills

  • Researching memory sharing between multiple agents that enable effective multi-agent collaboration

  • Improving context management techniques that solve the long-context / context derailment problem

  • Running evaluations for measuring and improving memory for agents

What We're Looking For:

  • Deep expertise in LLMs and retrieval

  • Track record of impactful research (breakthrough publications and/or open source contributions)

  • Ability to balance execution speed with empirical rigor

  • Real-world impact beyond pure academic work

Our culture

Signs it could be a great fit:

  • You want to maximize your impact: you want work on a small, incredibly talented team where every individual plays a huge role in the team's success. You wonder what it would have been like to be at OpenAI when it was just a dozen people, or Google when it was just a couple of grad students in a garage.

  • You’re excited to go head-to-head with tech giants, frontier labs, and other startups that are many times our size in both headcount and funding.

  • You are fundamentally opposed to closed frontier AI that is controlled by a handful of billionaires and private tech companies.

Signs it’s a bad fit:

  • You like stability, and get stressed out when there’s nobody telling you exactly what to do. We look for people that thrive in ambiguity and can intuit the most important problems by talking to customers and dogfooding our product.

  • You want to work a 9-5, and value clear separation of work from life. The stakes are the highest they've ever been, and the only moat is execution velocity. Operating on a strict 9-5 guarantees failure.

  • You value titles or want to people-manage. Letta is a flat company where every researcher and engineer is an individual contributor.

Our Interview Process:

  • Initial screen (30 min)

  • Technical screen (1-1.5 hours)

  • Paid in-person work trial (2 days onsite in SF)

As published by Letta. Applications are handled on their site.

Skills this posting mentions

Apache SparkOpen Source SoftwareArtificial Intelligence

About Letta

Today's AI agents struggle with fragmented context and limited memory. Just as computers needed operating systems to manage resources, your agents need intelligent context management to unlock their full potential. Letta is a complete operating system for building stateful agents AI agents. Letta handles state persistence, context compilation, and intelligent resource allocation, so you can focus on building applications powered by agents that actually learn. Letta was founded by the creators of MemGPT, which introduced memory (or context) management for AI agents. The company was spun out of the UC Berkeley Sky Computing research lab, and is advised by Ion Stoica (co-founder of Databricks, Anyscale) and funded by top-tier investors.

All 4 openings at Letta

One click, then it is written

Apply to Letta with a resume written for this role.

Queue Research Engineer / Scientist, Memory and I read the posting, rewrite your resume against it, draft the cover letter, and score the fit. Then you press send, or press one button and I fill in Letta’s form for you.

  1. 01Drop your resume

    A PDF or a LinkedIn URL. About a minute, once.

  2. 02I rank the openings

    Every weekday morning, the live catalog scored against your history. Up to 20 worth your time, not two hundred links.

  3. 03Each one is written up

    Resume rewritten for the posting, a cover letter, a fit score. Press send, or let me fill in the form.

  • 25 sent a week, free
  • No card
  • Nothing sent until you say so

More roles at Letta

See all

Similar roles elsewhere

See more

Put this to work

Paste your career in once. Every application after that is written for you.

Drop a resume or a LinkedIn URL. I rank the live openings against it, rewrite the resume and write a cover letter for the best of them, and fill in the employer's form when you press the button. You read, you decide what goes out.

  1. 01Drop your resume

    A PDF or a LinkedIn URL. About a minute, once.

  2. 02I rank the openings

    Every weekday morning, the live catalog scored against your history. Up to 20 worth your time, not two hundred links.

  3. 03Each one is written up

    Resume rewritten for the posting, a cover letter, a fit score. Press send, or let me fill in the form.

  • New matches ranked and written before you are up.
  • Every bullet stays inside what your history supports. Nothing invented.
  • Queued, submitted, interviewing, offer: one screen, not a spreadsheet.

500 free credits on sign-up. No card. Nothing is sent until you say so.

Listed from the job board Letta publishes. Refolk is not the employer and does not handle their hiring. Applications go to Letta directly.