Clera

Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization

  • LocationSan Francisco, California, United States
  • Listed20/10/2026
  • SalaryUS$130–225k/yr
  • FieldSoftware engineering

Average of 12 Research Engineer jobs in the United States we read: US$19,450/mo · updated October 22. A market reference, not this job's salary.

About the job

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.

Job details

Company
Clera
Work model
On-site
Contract
Full time
Posted
20 October 2026
Advert site
jobs.ashbyhq.com

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