Privacy Research Engineer, Safeguards

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Safeguards team seeks researchers to mitigate risks from model interactions with private user data by designing and implementing privacy-preserving techniques, auditing current approaches, and setting the direction for how Anthropic handles privacy more broadly.

Responsibilities

• Lead privacy analysis of frontier models, auditing the use of data and ensuring safety throughout the process
• Develop privacy-first training algorithms and techniques
• Develop evaluation and auditing techniques to measure the privacy of training algorithms
• Work with a small, senior team of engineers and researchers to enact a forward-looking privacy policy
• Advocate on behalf of users to ensure responsible handling of all data

Requirements

• Experience working on privacy-preserving machine learning
• Strong coding skills in Python
• Familiarity with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX
• Deep familiarity with large language models (how they work and how they are trained)
• Experience with privacy-preserving techniques (for example, differential privacy and how it differs from k-anonymity, l-diversity, and t-closeness)
• Track record of shipping products and features in a fast-moving environment
• Experience supporting fast-paced startup engineering teams
• Demonstrated ability to bring clarity and ownership to ambiguous technical problems
• Proven ability to lead cross-functional security or privacy initiatives and navigate complex organizational dynamics

Strong candidates may also have

• Publications on privacy-preserving ML at top academic venues
• Prior experience training large language models (dataset collection, pre-training, fine-tuning, RL fine-tuning, running evaluations)
• Prior experience developing tooling to support privacy-preserving ML (e.g., differential privacy tooling such as TF-Privacy or Opacus)

Compensation

• Annual salary range: $320,000 - $485,000 USD
• Total compensation package includes equity and benefits

Logistics & Qualifications

• Minimum: Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience
• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff expected to be in one of Anthropic’s offices at least ~25% of the time (some roles may require more time)
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas and retains an immigration lawyer to assist, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role/candidate

Benefits & Culture

• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office space in San Francisco
• Collaborative research culture valuing high-impact, empirical AI work and communication skills

How to apply

• Standard application asks for resume/CV or LinkedIn, and asks whether you require visa sponsorship and whether you are open to working in-person in an office ~25% of the time