Research Engineer, Chip Design RL (Reinforcement Learning)

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. The Reinforcement Learning (RL) teams at Anthropic lead RL research and development, contributing to Claude models and advancing autonomy, coding, and reasoning capabilities. This role sits at the intersection of RL research and engineering implementation and focuses on enabling models to design silicon.

Responsibilities

• Invent, design, and implement RL environments and evaluations for agentic RTL generation, design verification (including formal), and physical design optimization.
• Work on cross-cutting RL considerations such as EDA-tool latency optimization and proxy rewards.
• Conduct experiments, shape the research roadmap, and deliver work into research and production training runs.
• Collaborate closely with other researchers and engineers across Anthropic, including alignment and production training teams.

Requirements

• Expertise in ASIC or FPGA design, including RTL and design verification (UVM, formal methods, coverage-driven).
• Experience with physical design: synthesis, place-and-route, timing closure, and PPA optimization.
• Knowledge of DFT and ECOs.
• Fluency with industry EDA tools and processes; experience taking designs from spec to taped-out silicon is desirable.
• Ability to balance research exploration with engineering implementation and to deliver research into production training runs.
• Minimum education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
• Years of experience will correlate with internal job level requirements for the position.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with reinforcement learning, evaluations, or environments.
• Built tooling or automation around chip design flows.
• Experience working on ML accelerators or high-performance compute hardware.
• Familiarity with high-level synthesis or architecture simulators.

Logistics

• Locations: San Francisco, CA and New York City, NY.
• Location-based hybrid policy: staff are expected to be in one of the offices at least 25% of the time.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic states they sponsor visas and will make reasonable efforts to obtain a visa for an accepted candidate (with retained immigration counsel), though not every role/candidate may be successfully sponsored.

Compensation

• Annual Salary: $500,000 - $850,000 USD

Other

• Anthropic encourages applicants even if they do not meet every qualification listed and emphasizes diversity and safety in the hiring process.