Staff Engineer - Direct Contract with a Top AI Lab

Staff Engineer, Privacy Engineering — Direct Contract with a Top Frontier AI Lab

Role Overview

This is a direct engagement with one of the world's leading AI labs. Not an agency placement, not an outsourced team — you'll contract with the lab itself, work on their machines, commit to their monorepo, and sit alongside their engineers. G2i is running the search and the technical bar; the work and the relationship are theirs.

They've never staffed this way before. They're doing it here because the work can't leave their infrastructure, and because they need a small number of engineers they can genuinely trust with it.

The Work

You'll build the privacy layer underneath the lab's data pipeline: a scalable PII detection and scrubbing system covering the long tail of SaaS sources — CRM, document stores, messaging, code hosting, and dozens more — each with its own schema, quirks, and failure modes. The datasets are larger than any single machine can hold, so it runs distributed. Correctness isn't a quality target. A miss is a privacy incident.

This is genuinely hard engineering on a problem that doesn't have a reference implementation. The scope isn't fully specified — you'll help specify it.

Why This Is Worth Your Next Four Months

• Inside the building. You'll see how a frontier lab actually operates from the inside — their codebase, their standards, their engineers. Very few contract engagements offer that.

• Load-bearing work. Everything the lab does with purchased data flows through what you build. This isn't a side project or a proof of concept.

• A team of ten, all senior. No junior layer, no hand-holding, no one to manage. Everyone on this team clears the same bar you do.

• Top-of-market rates for staff-level contract work, and a four-month term with the option to extend.
  
  

Ideal Qualifications

• Staff-level or above — you've owned systems end to end, not just features.

• Strong Python. This is a Python codebase and you'll write it daily.

• Real distributed systems experience: data processing at scale, partial failure, throughput.

• Comfort with ambiguity, and a habit of decomposing a hard problem before writing code.

• Direct, precise communication. You'll be embedded with the lab's team.

• Fluent with AI tooling in your day-to-day engineering.

• Legally authorized to work in the US without sponsorship.

• Willing to complete an extensive background check — this is a condition of the engagement.

Prior privacy, security, or data-governance work is a plus, not a requirement.

Process

Resume submission → Technical screen with G2i engineering leadership → Client interview → Background check → Start

Our screen is a problem-decomposition exercise on this exact domain plus a live segment on how you use AI. It's hard on purpose. Everyone we forward has cleared it.

About G2i

G2i helps startups and AI labs hire senior engineers faster and smarter through video-based technical evaluation. We've placed thousands of developers worldwide since 2016 and built a community rooted in Quality, Urgency, and Agility.