Machine Learning Systems Engineer, RL Engineering

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems that are safe and beneficial for users and society. The team is a group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders collaborating to build beneficial AI systems.

About the Role

As a Machine Learning Systems Engineer on the Reinforcement Learning Engineering team, you will build and improve the cutting-edge systems that train AI models like Claude. Your responsibility includes developing critical algorithms and infrastructure to support researchers in model training. Focus will be on enhancing the performance, robustness, and usability of these systems to accelerate research efforts. You will work closely with finetuning researchers using RLHF and related methods to train production and internal research models.

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and improve training algorithms and systems used by researchers
• Improve speed, reliability, and ease-of-use of training systems
• Profile reinforcement learning pipelines for improvement opportunities
• Build systems to launch training jobs in test environments for rapid issue detection
• Adapt finetuning systems to new model architectures
• Build instrumentation to detect and resolve Python GIL contention in training code
• Diagnose and fix performance slowdowns in training runs
• Implement stable, fast versions of new training algorithms proposed by researchers

Requirements

• 4+ years of software engineering experience
• Interest in building systems and tools that enhance others' productivity
• Results-oriented with flexibility and impact focus
• Willingness to assist beyond job description
• Enjoy pair programming
• Desire to learn more about machine learning research
• Care about societal impacts of work

Strong candidates may also have experience with:

• High performance, large scale distributed systems
• Large scale LLM training
• Python programming
• Implementing LLM finetuning algorithms like RLHF

Benefits and Logistics

• Salary range: $300,000 - $405,000 USD annually
• Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• Hybrid location policy: at least 25% on-site presence expected
• Visa sponsorship available with reasonable effort
• Diverse and inclusive work environment emphasizing collaboration and high-impact AI research
• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and a collaborative office space in San Francisco

Company Mission and Culture

Anthropic operates as a unified team focused on a few large-scale research initiatives with an emphasis on steerable, trustworthy AI. The company values empirical science approaches and fosters frequent research discussions to prioritize high-impact work. Communication skills are highly valued.

Research areas build on prior work related to GPT-3, multimodal neurons, AI safety, scaling laws, and learning from human preferences.

Application Information

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis with no deadline. Encouragement to apply even if not all qualifications are met, emphasizing diversity and representation in the workplace.