Research Engineer Full Time
Consumer Reports (CR) is seeking a Research Engineer to develop new tools that grow consumers’ power, privacy, and access to informed choices. You will roll up your sleeves to build prototypes, conduct technology assessments, and take ownership of other time-bound tasks to advance CR’s overall innovation strategy. You will also have the opportunity to publish and contribute to open source projects, and present in relevant publications and conferences to raise CR’s profile as a technology leader.
This is a role on CR’s Innovation Lab team. In this position, you’ll be reporting to the Head of Experimental Engineering.
HOW YOU’LL MAKE AN IMPACT
As Research Engineer, you’ll have an opportunity to work on some of the most pressing issues facing consumers today: How we find information. How we protect our personal data. How we get the fair treatment we deserve.
This is an opportunity to ship code that has a real impact on the marketplace and people’s lives. You will help CR nurture new technologies and solutions that advance consumers’ interests, and which can be scaled up by CR or like-minded partners. Some of your projects will inform future revenue-generating projects underwriting CR’s non-profit mission; others will help us fail faster and smarter, with valuable learnings for our peers trying to build a better marketplace. All of your projects will be guided by the mission of making the marketplace better for everyone.
ABOUT YOU
You’ll Be Highly Rated If:
- You have at least 5 years experience: doing creative engineering
- You’re the swiss army knife of technology skills: you are fluent in common JavaScript and Python development frameworks– both back-end (such as Django) and front-end (familiarity with at least one front-end framework, ideally React).
- You’ve demonstrated curiosity for solving challenging and non-straightforward engineering problems: this might be reflected in a prior research engineering position, contributions to open source projects, self-directed programming projects, or something you’ll surprise us with.
- You’re a strong generalist: You have a broad grasp of computer science and engineering fundamentals, but also deep expertise in at least one specific domain. You’re excited about contributing your skills and creative problem solving to a small, fast-paced R&D team.
- You’re curious and learn fast: You check Hacker News daily. You can quickly master new libraries and APIs. You’re able to hold a conversation on breakthroughs or foundational papers in new domains like AI; you enjoy self-directed study to help advance our research frontiers.
- You’re professional: You write clean, merge-friendly code, coherent docs, and good tests.
- You’re curious and learn fast: You check Hacker News daily. You can quickly master new libraries and APIs. You’re able to hold a conversation on breakthroughs or foundational papers in new fields of research like generative AI; you enjoy self-directed study to help advance our research frontiers.
- You take ownership: you can translate intent into discrete programming work units from planning through delivery — e.g., improving source layouts, implementing new features, fixing bugs, designing UIs, benchmarking and developing optimization strategies, etc.
You’ll Be One Of Our Top Picks If:
- You’ve got a portfolio of interesting work on GitHub.
- You’ve got a track record of shipping in diverse institutional contexts: You’ve contributed creative engineering or technical perspectives to help achieve institutional objectives; you’ve shipped things that people want to use
- You have strong communication skills in both technology and strategy: Can you articulate the behavior of a nondeterministic bug and also articulate a vision for improving the Internet?
- You are familiar with basic DevOps tools and frameworks: such as Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS.
- You’ve developed at least a fascination and conceptual knowledge of application development using large language models: such as GPT-3.5/4, Claude, and Dolly; knowledge of embedding, fine-tuning, and other customization approaches to leverage models in custom applications.