Research Engineer, Privacy and Anonymization

HUD is building infrastructure to create RL training data and evals for frontier AI agents as well as a marketplace to sell these to frontier labs through the HUD marketplace. Our platform is used by frontier labs Fortune 500 companies and startups. Weve raised $16M from top VCs and were YC W25.

Were looking for a Research Engineer to build the privacy and anonymization systems that make sensitive real-world data safe and useful for AI training. Youll develop methods to detect and remove PII secrets and other sensitive information from raw data before it enters our processing and synthetic data pipelines. Youll own the full pipeline for protecting privacy without destroying the structure and signal that make data valuable for training agents.

• Build systems to detect PII quasi-identifiers credentials and other sensitive information and design transformations based on the data type and downstream use case

• Develop and benchmark detection approaches that combine rules statistical models classifiers and LLM-based methods

• Build production pipelines that anonymize raw data before it enters downstream processing training evaluation or synthetic data generation workflows

• Create evaluation frameworks that measure privacy risk and retained data utility including recall-weighted metrics leakage tests and adversarial re-identification attempts

• Design systems that remain robust to new data sources schema drift unusual formats and sensitive information embedded in unexpected fields

• Work with engineering research operations and customers to translate privacy requirements into practical technical policies and safeguards

You may be a good fit if you have:

• Strong proficiency in Python and experience building reliable production data or ML systems

• Experience with information extraction named-entity recognition classification or related methods for detecting rare or sensitive content

• Strong experimental instincts and the ability to compare approaches across recall precision latency cost and downstream data utility

• An understanding of the difference between redaction masking pseudonymization anonymization and synthetic dataand when each is appropriate

• High attention to detail and the ability to reason about subtle leakage paths edge cases and adversarial failure modes

• Built data processing pipelines end-to-end without a fully prescribed roadmap

Strong candidates may also have:

• Hands-on experience with privacy-enhancing technologies such as differential privacy k-anonymity secure aggregation format-preserving encryption etc.

• Worked with sensitive data in areas such as healthcare finance or security

• Built low-latency or high-throughput ML inference and data-processing systems

• Worked in unstructured problem spaces and take ownership from early research through production deployment

• Early-stage startup experience and strong communication skills for collaboration across teams and time zones

We prioritize technical aptitude and learning potential over years of experience. Motivated candidates are encouraged to apply even if they dont meet all criteria.

• Team Size: 25 people currently mostly full-time in-person but some remote.

• Our team: Our team includes 4 International Olympiad medalists (IOI ILO IPhO) serial AI startup founders and researchers with publications at ICLR NeurIPS etc.

• Company stage: We have 8 figures in funding and are scaling profitably and quickly to meet very strong demand.

• Employment: Full-time.

• Location: We have offices in San Francisco or Singapore but are open to remote candidates who can work hours that 70-80% overlap with either San Francisco or Singapore time zones.

• Visa Sponsorship: We provide support for relocation and visas for strong full-time candidates to the US or Singapore.

• Timeline: Applications are rolling. The process is 2 technical interviews and a 2-3 day work trial.

• Competitive compensation

• 100% covered top-of-the-line medical dental and vision from Blue Shield of CA (US employees)

• Lunch and dinner when youre in the office (in-office employees)

• Company-wide holiday break (Christmas Eve to New Years Day) on top of PTO and paid holidays

• Other perks including an Equinox membership 401k and commuter benefits (US employees)

• Unlimited* access to tokens for ChatGPT Claude Code Cursor etc. *By unlimited we mean no one on our token usage leaderboard has ever hit a limit. So we have no idea what the limit is.

Due to high volume we may not actively respond to every application but feel free to contact us at or elsewhere if we missed your application!

Required Experience:

IC