Research Engineer (Full Time)

About Crater Crater is a next generation email client that predicts the emails you want to read, and the actions you want to take before you think to do them.

We strongly believe that the most durable, interesting problems to work on are those that convert "user preference feedback-loops" into action. We also believe that email, as a source of context for billions, remains an underrated place to build product.

The Role We're hiring our founding team, with specific emphasis on research engineers who will be directly responsible for our intuitive inbox recommendation algorithm, improving loops around retrieval/hybrid search. Backgrounds in tooling, eval-driven development, or product are highly favored, but nothing is a must.

Eventually, we hope to use the ranking of emails as proxy for understanding the pieces of work people care about, and have our client become an interface for managing "agents" that passively improve parts of your life. . If you're specifically interested in workin on this project, email directly w/ reference in the subject line.

Key Responsibilities

You’ll work on a team of less than 8 to build, improve and productionize either:

1. "Intuitive inbox" ranking algorithm for email, or

2. Central RLHF loop on hybrid search

• Expect lots of eval-driven development, experimentation, and testing in production
  Engineering-first organization

Required Skills

All we ask is that candidates have a track record of building and shipping great products. Whether you're working on research, infra, or client, we ask decisions to be made with users in mind.

We're a small, talent-dense, lean team. All of our engineering hours are on recommendations, search, and product. Flat org, with lots of ownership and autonomy. Apply if you want to solve hard problems and see your solutions put into production.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: Market rate US, SF Bay Area cash compensation. Significantly above-market founding engineer equity grants.

• Transportation: Covered

• Work Hour Meals: Covered

• Work Schedule: 6 days a week in North Beach office.
  Apply If you share this belief, whether as an early engineer or simply interested in learning more, don't hesitate to reach out at hello@crater.so . If you're specifically interested in working on this project, email directly with reference in the subject line.