Research Engineer – Cybersecurity RL

Details

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

The Horizons team leads Anthropic's reinforcement learning (RL) research and development, playing a critical role in advancing our AI systems. We've contributed to every Claude release, with significant impact on the autonomy, coding, and reasoning capabilities of Anthropic's models.

We are hiring for the Cybersecurity RL team within Horizons. As a Research Engineer, you'll help to safely advance the capabilities of our models in secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and other areas of defensive cybersecurity. This role blends research and engineering: you will both develop novel approaches and realize them in code. Your work will include designing and implementing RL environments, conducting experiments and evaluations, delivering your work into production training runs, and collaborating with other researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists across and outside Anthropic.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement reinforcement learning (RL) environments focused on cybersecurity tasks.
• Conduct experiments and evaluations to measure model capabilities in secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and related defensive use cases.
• Implement research ideas in code and deliver them for production training runs.
• Collaborate with researchers, engineers, and cybersecurity specialists inside and outside Anthropic.
• Balance research exploration with engineering implementation to move projects from prototyping to production-scale training.

Requirements

• Domain expertise in cybersecurity (applied defensive security experience is expected).
• Experience with machine learning; familiarity with RL techniques and environments is desirable.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience delivering code used in training runs or production environments.
• Ability to balance research exploration with engineering implementation and to communicate effectively across teams.
• Education: At least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

Strong candidates may also have:

• Professional experience in security engineering, fuzzing, detection and response, or other applied defensive work.
• Experience participating in or building CTF competitions and cyber ranges.
• Academic research experience in cybersecurity.
• Familiarity with LLM training methodologies.

Compensation

• Annual base salary: $300,000 - $405,000 USD.
• Total compensation for full-time employees includes equity, benefits, and may include incentive compensation.

Logistics

• Locations: San Francisco, CA and New York City, NY.
• Location-based hybrid policy: currently expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time; some roles may require more time in office.
• Visa sponsorship: Anthropic does sponsor visas and retains an immigration lawyer, though sponsorship is not guaranteed for every role/candidate.
• We require at least a Bachelor's degree in a related field or equivalent experience.

How we're different

• We focus on large-scale, high-impact AI research as a cohesive team and value collaboration, communication, and rigorous empirical work.
• Our research directions include work on RL, interpretability, scaling, and learning from human preferences.

Benefits & Culture

• Competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and collaborative office spaces.
• Encouragement for candidates from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds to apply.

Application guidance

• Candidates are asked to review Anthropic's candidate AI guidance for the application process.