Job description

[app.ashbyhq.com] ABOUT BASIS Basis builds real agents that do real work in the real economy. Our agents operate for hours at a time, performing end-to-end work for some of the largest accounting firms in the world. We recently raised $100M at >$1B valuation and are racing to deploy the most advanced applied ML at production scale. Our investors include: Khosla Ventures (Keith Rabois & Vinod Khosla), Accel (Miles Clements), Google Ventures, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross, Adam D'Angelo, Jeff Dean, Jack Altman, Noam Brown, Kyle Vogt, Amjad Masad, Clem Delangue and many other operators/technical leaders. "Basis is on the frontier of building production-grade, long-horizon agents. They've pushed the limits of what we thought our models could do on real-world, economically valuable, complex accounting tasks. They've been a great collaborator in helping us shape what the future of agents looks like." — Prashant Mital, Applied AI Lead, OpenAI THE ROLE Every team building agents has access to the same models. Most of the attention goes to the product and its behaviors. The compounding work sits underneath: what the agent knows, how it reasons about its work, and how we measure whether it did the job well. At Basis, our agents autonomously perform real accounting work: reconciliations, tax preparation, audit procedures, financial analysis. Often, the quality of this work is not determined by which model we use. It is determined by the context those agents receive: the procedures that define what to do, the domain knowledge that defines how, and the evaluations that tell us whether it worked. To deliver frontier intelligence, we treat context like a product. The procedures, the skills, the system prompts. Each is owned, versioned, and held to a quality bar. Intelligence Architects build the coherent systems that construct our agents’ intelligence from disparate information. You hold the mental model of what each agent knows, how it reasons, and how we measure whether it's working. You write the procedures and skills. You define what "good" means at every layer and design how we measure it. Ultimately, you're orchestrating an intelligence whose ceiling rises with every model release, and whose capability compounds with every edit you make. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING Architecting and authoring our agents' context. You decide what context our agents need, how it's structured, and what each layer says. You write the procedures, skills, and system prompts they consume. Setting the standards. Ensuring consistency across our agents is your primary mission. You define how procedures should be written, what makes a skill document load-bearing, when context is ready to ship. Each product team operates to the standards you set. Signal to action. You watch the agents at work. When their output isn't good enough, you’ll define what's missing in the context and solve it. The measurement work is shared with product and eval teams; the writing work is yours. Shaping what comes next. Your perspective informs what we build next. You see across both the agents of today and the possibilities of tomorrow as the substrate improves. That view feeds into product decisions about which surfaces become possible and which existing ones graduate to higher capability. WHAT YOU'LL BRING Writing as a craft. You treat language as load-bearing. You catch the sentence that will be misread before it ships. You have excellent taste. Reasoning about systems. You see how individual parts contribute to an overall system. When something breaks, your first question isn't what failed but how the system allowed it. Working from causes, not effects. You don't accept "it works" as evidence that you understand why. You want to know what’s caused the improvement, and which layer allowed the failure. Drawn to the frontier. The questions in this role don't have answers in any textbook. That's the part that excites you, not the part that worries you. Motivation by learning. You build accurate mental models of new fields fast. The accountants and engineers you work with should feel that you understand their work, not just talk about it. Comfort in ambiguity. There are often no right answers. What you write becomes binding and shapes thousands of agent decisions. You take that seriously without being paralyzed by it. Holding many things at once. You hold the user's problem, the agent's behavior, the procedure's language, and the measure of success in your head at once. You don't lose the thread. WHO MIGHT BE A FIT This role doesn't have a standard background. The people who do it well come from many places. What unifies the best candidates is a deep curiosity about the frontier of technology and what it enables. - Engineers and PMs who've drifted from building systems to questioning whether the system is doing the right thing. You debug problems for users that aren't your job to fix. - Philosophers who've spent years writing precise prose about systems no one else understood. The novelty doesn't intimidate you; it's the reason you do the work. - Lawyers who write the kind of language other people have to follow. You've felt the difference between a phrase that holds and one that doesn't. - Accountants who appreciate language and want to shape the future of your profession. - Editors and writers who treat structured prose as engineering. You've seen instructions get misread at scale and you know why. - Academics tired of producing work that nobody acts on. You want your writing to change something, and you want to be where the change is happening. - Anyone who reads about what we're doing and recognizes the work as theirs. BENEFITS AT BASIS We offer a competitive and thoughtful benefits package designed to support your physical, mental, and financial well-being: - Health & Wellness: Premium Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage; Life Insurance; and 6 coaching & 6 therapy sessions through Spring Health. - Basis will cover 100% of your Wellhub Gold wellhub.com membership. - Wellhub gives you access to gyms like Lifetime, SoulCycle, NYSC and so many more - as well as access to wellness apps like Strava & Headspace! - Time off: Unlimited PTO + 12 paid company holidays. - In-Office Perks: Daily meal stipends, a fully stocked kitchen, and $300 toward your custom desk setup. - Financial Benefits: Pre-tax commuter benefits and 401(k) retirement plan - Team Culture: Monthly office activities and frequent optional team happy hours. - Parental Support: Access to Carrot Fertility and paid parental leave.

Requirements

Must-haves

To deliver frontier intelligence, we treat context like a product. The procedures, the skills, the system prompts. Each is owned, versioned, and held to a quality bar.
Architecting and authoring our agents' context. You decide what context our agents need, how it's structured, and what each layer says. You write the procedures, skills, and system prompts they consume.
Writing as a craft. You treat language as load-bearing. You catch the sentence that will be misread before it ships. You have excellent taste.
Reasoning about systems. You see how individual parts contribute to an overall system. When something breaks, your first question isn't what failed but how the system allowed it.
Working from causes, not effects. You don't accept "it works" as evidence that you understand why. You want to know what’s caused the improvement, and which layer allowed the failure.
Drawn to the frontier. The questions in this role don't have answers in any textbook. That's the part that excites you, not the part that worries you.
Motivation by learning. You build accurate mental models of new fields fast. The accountants and engineers you work with should feel that you understand their work, not just talk about it.
Comfort in ambiguity. There are often no right answers. What you write becomes binding and shapes thousands of agent decisions. You take that seriously without being paralyzed by it.
Holding many things at once. You hold the user's problem, the agent's behavior, the procedure's language, and the measure of success in your head at once. You don't lose the thread.
This role doesn't have a standard background. The people who do it well come from many places. What unifies the best candidates is a deep curiosity about the frontier of technology and what it enables.
Engineers and PMs who've drifted from building systems to questioning whether the system is doing the right thing. You debug problems for users that aren't your job to fix.
Philosophers who've spent years writing precise prose about systems no one else understood. The novelty doesn't intimidate you; it's the reason you do the work.
Lawyers who write the kind of language other people have to follow. You've felt the difference between a phrase that holds and one that doesn't.
Accountants who appreciate language and want to shape the future of your profession.
Editors and writers who treat structured prose as engineering. You've seen instructions get misread at scale and you know why.
Academics tired of producing work that nobody acts on. You want your writing to change something, and you want to be where the change is happening.
Anyone who reads about what we're doing and recognizes the work as theirs.
We offer a competitive and thoughtful benefits package designed to support your physical, mental, and financial well-being:
Wellhub gives you access to gyms like Lifetime, SoulCycle, NYSC and so many more - as well as access to wellness apps like Strava & Headspace!
In-Office Perks: Daily meal stipends, a fully stocked kitchen, and $300 toward your custom desk setup.
Team Culture: Monthly office activities and frequent optional team happy hours.

Nice-to-haves

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Keywords to mirror

apimlai

Platform: ashby
Effort: quick

Benefits

Benefits detected in the listing.

Dental

Vision

401(K)

Pto

Parental Leave

Wellness